For premium publishers such as the NY Times, I'm not surprised there isn't a drop off in revenue when targeted ads were dropped.
They are pretty much all high value visitors (from an economic perspective).
After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
391–400 of 464 posts
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#392Earlier 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…
This is a clear cut case of what Sinclair was talking about.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that this "target group" is typically "people that visited your website and stayed there for some time". Unless you have a promo, you really don't want to advertise to them... But that is exactly what you end up doing, because you can't target "people that visited my website 6+ months ago".
Why not?
Actually, you can. This is called "spam".
When someone stops visiting your site, make sure to send them a email. Ask them to return! You have their email address, right?
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
You grossly misunderstand digital advertising or your bias has completed clouded your logic. > A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it. No idea what you mean here by cheating or novel thought. We're talking about whether knowing that info allows you to have more successful advertisin…
> Serving John ads for roses, chocolates, and vacations will be more effective than serving those ads to a random person. That statement makes sense intuitively, but what we're discussing here is whether our intuition reflects reality. It may seem to self-evident to you, but do you have data? All of your examples "make sense" from the same intuitive perspective, but all assume the subjects are positively influenced b…
Marketing intuition is literally what you’re talking about. They teach it in schools. It’s existed for hundreds of years.
Your deep bias is breaking your logic. These are assumptions that marketers test. If they work, you keep doing it. If it doesn’t, you try something else. You clearly have no idea how the industry works, otherwise you’d understand that you’re arguments have been addressed.
Correlation is the entire point of that advertising. No marketer cares whether being single causes a purchase, simply that being single is correlated with a purchase more than a random amount.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples of effective targeting: - Intent targeting via search remains by far the most effective form of targeting. Type life insurance into Google, very high value ads. Mortgage, a car model, etc. This is why Google is so valuable. - For display, the biggest lift from targeting is via retargeting (showing you the shirt you considered on a commerce site) New York Times was definitely using ad exchanges only for their…
> Intent targeting I wonder how effective it is actually. The narrative we are lead to believe is that the user will be thankful to get the information it needs surfaced right in front of them. Or the difference between the paid ad and the organic results will be blurry enough to not have an impact. Yet I think it works only if: - the ad effectively matches what the user is looking for (that's not a given, even amazo…
> The narrative we are lead to believe is that the user will be thankful to get the information it needs surfaced right in front of them.
This is not the point of advertising at all. You’re operating on incorrect assumptions.
There are many different objectives of advertising. Imagine you’re in market for a vacuum. You might only be aware of a few brands, so other brands need to advertise so you become aware of their product. You may have forgotten about a brand that you previously liked, so they advertise. You might be considering one vacuum, but are potentially open to spending more on a premium model. You might be doubting the trustworthiness of a brand, until you seen them advertising on NYT. You might also need a new broom if you’re buying a new vacuum. What about this new product I invented, scented bags. How am I supposed to inform you about those?
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cutting out the middlemen and their asinine trackers might also help reduce the number of third-party scripts and random HTTP requests on the page. This will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to help increase revenue.
> This will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to help increase revenue. Most ad loaders actually run async these days, cutting out middlemen/trackers doesn't help you for time-to-first-readable-content. Biggest culprit there are expensive assets like dozens of different fonts/variation combos, pre-roll video ads and uncompressed images.
Ad-infested pages often feel sluggish even after all the readable content has loaded. It feels like the page hasn't finished loading yet.
After all, it takes CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to run scripts and load images in the background. The difference is especially noticeable on mobile, and it's even worse when the scripts trigger redraws or mess with the scrolling.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#397This 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?
I’ve heard it said that Google would rather keep them round doing nothing than have them go to a competitor.
That’s just rumour, but it would help explain Google’s ephemeral approach to new products.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#398Earlier 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…
Show of hands. How many people have clicked on an ad and bought something directly related to the ad? I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I t…
I have literally never done so. I have, however, mentally blacklisted brands that had obnoxious ads, and I have always had a really low threshold for that determination.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show of hands. How many people have clicked on an ad and bought something directly related to the ad? I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I t…
Haha, similar. I was shopping around for a Sony mirrorless camera a year ago. Ended up with the model I actually had in mind in the first place (A7S2 for its supreme low light capability), but shit am I hounded on the Internet either for Sony cameras or accessories. And there's no way I know of to get rid of it! And for what its worth even Facebook and Instagram (at least the latter, I only use on my tablet in the ap…
Would an ad blocker not get rid of most of it? I rarely see any ads these days with Ghostery running.
Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue
#400I 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 would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. 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 d…
Targeted ads are almost universally pretty terrible. My reaction to seeing a targeted ad usually falls into one of these categories:
- I already bought that recently, why would I need another one?
- I already decided which variety of thing you're showing me I will buy, this ad isn't helpful to me.
- Why are you spying on me? That's creepy, I'm not going to click that ad even if it was exactly the thing I wanted to buy right now.
I expect that this experience isn't extraordinarily unique. Having less targeted ads is actually somewhat helpful because it maintains the pretense that ad companies aren't spying on you constantly.