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After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

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Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#361

Post by cyborgx7 »

manigandham wrote: post #337
cyborgx7 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm one of the few in the industry who actually spent time and money on regulation. I've met with Senators and major CMOs to make it happen. It's not that simple. GDPR has good intent but is poorly executed and has no measurable effect on privacy because those politicians fail to understand the market they're regulating. This is now playing out again in the recent copyright directives. I'm reading that you are a mem…

GDPR is not meant to be followed to the letter, it's legislation on principle and will continue to be ineffective and only cause further problems for the EU, while entrenching the very companies that it most wanted to protect people from. California's privacy act is a much better legal framework in case you want examples. Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted d…

>GDPR is not meant to be followed to the letter, it's legislation on principle and will continue to be ineffective and only cause further problems for the EU, while entrenching the very companies that it most wanted to protect people from. California's privacy act is a much better legal framework in case you want examples.

Everytime an advertiser complains about the GDPR I become more confident in its rightousness.

>Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision

So you want to focus targeting completely on the source, not the individual audience member? Than we are in agreement.

>dvertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have

We could also just ban it. Not that I am against changing the economic system.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#362

Post by alkonaut »

manigandham wrote: post #349
alkonaut wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players > curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here not downvoting but I suppose it might be that your post comes across as saying that's necessarily a bad thing. if you need to be a big publisher to mamage doing well-behaved (not ad-net served ads) and you aren't a big player - then my opinion is you should shut down rather than use ad-nets. I don't c…

The biggest players are Facebook and Google who are further entrenched by this regulation, even though it seems like they were supposed to be the targets. All the other sites suffer as a result, while only large ones like NYT stay viable. Many smaller players are now looking at paywalls or patronage to stay in business. You can easily avoid sites you do not like but I don't see what that has to do with integrity (of…

I don’t mind paywalls. I do mind paying with my information rather than with money without being given an option.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#363

Post by cyborgx7 »

throwawaymath wrote: post #249
cyborgx7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about the tracking here, not the advertising. Reasonable people can not disagree on weather or not tracking everyone individually is harmful or not.

The heart of what I'm getting at is that you cannot be the arbiter of whether or not it's reasonable to disagree about that. As a direct consequence, being cavalier about it will not work for solving the problem. I'm trying to inject nuance into a problem I'm acknowledging exists, not engage in a holy war against the existence of the problem. If you think reasonable people can't disagree with you about this topic, th…

>Instead replace that thought with the idea that a nontrivial number of software engineers - likely the supermajority - will be materially impacted by significantly changing the amount of tracking enabled by advertising.

The argument that you can't fight evil industries, because there are people who depend on them, will never be a convincing one.

And yes, if you think spying on everyone on the internet on a massive scale is fine, I do not consider you reasonable.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#364

Post by ocdtrekkie »

FakeComments wrote: post #271
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a diet. Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these people? It's possible that some combination of…

There’s a bigger effect: context. I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics. Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context…

I think you came really close to the salient point, but then missed it: Targeted advertising is, as you said, really not that much more effective as context-based advertising, unless you're an ad-tracking behemoth trying to convince companies they need your product.

The whole surveillance capitalism nonsense we live under is a way for ad networks to justify their existence. If you're a company that has data on everyone, you need to convince people they need that data to accurately sell ads, and targeted advertising exists solely for that purpose. The amount of cross-site tracking that these companies are able to do outscales what any company could manage to accomplish themselves, or even for a smaller competitor to step in, so as long as targeting users across the entire Internet is believed to be a must-have, these ad behemoths stay on top.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#365

Post by Osiris »

bitofhope wrote: post #6

I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

I keep seeing the same ad over and over again even though I'm clearly not interested. The variety that I see is really narrow. Wouldn't it be better to give people a much higher variety of ads rather than bombarding them with the same ones over and over?

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#366

Post by vertexFarm »

buboard wrote: post #44
cribbles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source for this claim?

https://digiday.com/media/impact-gdpr-5-charts/ https://voxeu.org/article/short-run-effects-gdpr-technology-...

Some of this shows it's hurting smaller adtech companies (read: advertisers who aren't google, facebook, amazon) but nothing here really shows it's hurting smaller site's revenue in general. There's some speculative stuff like how investors are reacting.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#367

Post by vertexFarm »

cm2012 wrote: post #146

It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

This is an effect more people should experience. Everyone should study and work in their area of specialty until they are considered professionally competent in that subject, then go check out that subject's subreddit. Feel bleak and abject despair. Realize you should never use reddit / similar voting-based internet forums to learn about subjects you don't understand because the signal-to-noise ratio is miserable. It's all people who don't know yet they don't let that fact stop them from posting. Early generations of charlatans "educate" successive generations and so you have this illusion that people might know what they're talking about or at least it appears like there's some legit group consensus. But it's just people going around replying in every sub-thread parroting what some random shmoe posted elsewhere in the very same thread; people racing to parrot it before other people parrot it so they get to be top parrot. People vote for stuff that's familiar to them because we universally are attracted to things we already recognize, so what we get is a bunch of those special sort of misconceptions that are popular among novices churning around endlessly.

I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#368

Post by thomasmeeks »

Osiris wrote: post #365
bitofhope wrote: post #6

I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

I keep seeing the same ad over and over again even though I'm clearly not interested. The variety that I see is really narrow. Wouldn't it be better to give people a much higher variety of ads rather than bombarding them with the same ones over and over?

It sounds like you're being hit with a retargeting ads (you look at a fridge, and then suddenly the entire internet showing you fridges from that, or related, retailers).

Retargeting is considered to be a pretty efficient ad spend. Though sometimes I do wonder if the numbers are inflated by people like me: I'll tend to look at an item, throw it in the back of my mind, and purchase weeks/months later after some consideration. It's a longstanding habit, and I block the very vast majority of ads -- so retargeting doesn't factor in as far as I'm aware.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#369

Post by Barrin92 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #251
pjc50 wrote: post #3

This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?

If that turns out to be true what are all the talented people at Google and Facebook supposed to do?

Well hopefully integrating technology deeply into the rest of the economy to bring up productivity and share prosperity rather than trying to hijack people's attention with surface level consumer products.

There is a very interesting generational rift between the pre-web companies like Microsoft and Apple and the Google/Facebook generation.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#370

Post by jethro_tell »

komali2 wrote: post #346
FakeComments wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a bigger effect: context. I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics. Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context…

>Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context. This seems to me what "targeted advertising" should mean - NYT says "for all routes of nytimes.com/politics, show political ads. If it's local news, open it up to classifieds for local business." Etc. If someone's on the page,…

To show the ad to the consumer? I'd say yes. To sell the ad, when google is selling hyper informative profiles down the road. Maybe not. Not that people who buy ads or keywords or whatever have the best idea of who they should sell it to
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