After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by rlue » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

This reminds me of a meme I saw once upon a time:

> Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.

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

#402

Post by darkpuma » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

jrobn wrote: post #371

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…

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…

Amazon affiliate links for books are the sole times I've ever clicked on an ad with the intention to buy the product behind it. And I can count the number of times I've done that on one hand.

Incidentally, those weren't targeted ads. Those were ads hand-picked by the person producing the content about those books. From that very small sample I conclude that ads relevant to the context in which they're placed are more effective than targeted ads.

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

#403

Post by MarkMc » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:20 AM UTC

krisroadruck wrote: post #288

kuwze wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue imho is that there is no shared sales information. So you advertise BMWs to people who may have already purchased a car. I think that is a bigger issue.

This happened to me both times I've purchased a Jeep. I did a bunch of research on models and packages, price shopped a few dealers in my area, and then purchased a vehicle all over the course of a Saturday. For the next 3 months I get jeep ads following me all around the internet. I wonder how much revenue those completely irrelevant ads generated for google.

Don't you give Jeep your name and address when you buy the vehicle? Seems like they are missing an opportunity to improve their advertising.

Also Google could place a survey question instead of an ad, asking "Which of these products have you purchased in the past month?"

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

#404

Post by robryan » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:28 AM UTC

misterprime wrote: post #238

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're sniping existing customers from other retailers, which is zero-sum when everybody does it, and it's possible for your competitors to tell when you're doing it and retaliate by doing the same. At which point you're both paying for advertising that only cancels out the competitor's advertising. A smart retailer is not going to be the first one to take a turn down that road. It's essentially iterated prisone…

That may be the genius of targeted ads. Once one vendor starts doing it, the other vendors have no choice but to bid on the same target. Winner: ad platform.

Yeah, can get to a situation where an ad platform would be making more out of a market segment than the retailers in that segment.

If I have a $20 margin, I am better off giving Google $15 and getting an incremental $5 profit than not advertising. Even worse if my customers have a lifetime value of $50 it may make sense to give Google $45 and not see a return from my spend until years down the road while Google gets the $45 right now.

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

#405

Post by mikemotherwell » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Serious question: is a person always the same on every site? Can they be reached with the same message in different contexts? The argument for targeting says yes, but then why is porn ignored? Real people, doing, ahem, real things for significant time, but no advertiser (as a rounding error on total advertising spend worldwide) wants to advertise on porn sites.

I think a message's context matters - and this is almost self evident from examples like ads for airline tickets being shown on plane crash articles. I think targeting is great, I really do, but I think the value of trusted brands is likely just as, if not more, strong.

If context matters, and I think that argument was the entrenched idea pre-internet and has not been disproven, then where is the positioning of targeting? My hypothesis would be that targeting is likely best utilised when people stray from self selecting brands, e.g. NYTimes needs no targeting, but a smaller publication likely does, as people aren't there for the brand's known positioning, but because of their targetable interests, e.g. they ended up on a site about coding, or computer games, or knitting or whatever.

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

#406

Post by skilled » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:32 AM UTC

skilled wrote: post #35

I can't be the only one who thinks behavioral targeting is a bit creepy? This has happened to me at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years: I go to a supermarket or a store that I have never been to, I do shopping and come back home. After a few hours, I pick up my phone to check Email/Facebook, only to find myself staring at an advert for a product that's sitting in my fridge. I mean, come on... The first time this hap…

I was watching a Joe Rogan podcast repeat with Theo Von last night and he literally mentioned this same this same thing halfway through .. That's some matrix sh*t right here... Hahaha.

Disclosure: I am replying to my own comment.

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

#407

Post by c3534l » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:43 AM UTC

I'm no advertising expert, but I have seen a number of stories over the years of companies being disillusioned by the promise of targeted ads. One common thread I've noticed is that most people don't have a targeted product and a targeted message. Most products generally have broad appeal and a lot of ad campaigns work by changing the general perception of a product.

Advertising in the New York Times in general is already targeted in some fashion (you know the basic demographic of New York Times readers), and if you want to advertise laundry detergent there's not a lot to gain from knowing a person's exact age and the gender of all his siblings siblings and the top keyword searches he made on Pornhub. Logically speaking, it seems for targeted advertising to be worth it, you'd need an unusually high response to advertising among a very narrow selection of people who can be identified as such, and that these people don't have an obvious place where they can be found.

In the case of the New York Times, that means you have a product whose message is going to be wasted on the majority of the population; who can only be communicated with through a general interest publisher like the New York Times, but not a website or conference dedicated to that thing; but who can none the less be easily identified through invasive and secretive tracking data, but not through what news stories they're viewing; who will be very responsive to advertising (so not people who are domain experts in a particular hobby or career and will choose a product by intentionally seeking information on that product and rationally weigh their alternatives); and who are a large enough group that it's even worth putting together an advertising campaign.

And how responsive are people to ads even on a base level anyway? Award-winning campaigns like "You Got Milk" had massive impact on culture and awareness, but didn't drive sales.

With so many hurdles, targeted advertising seems like something that provides only marginal and diminishing returns. Newspapers seem like just about the worst place to benefit from violating user privacy. It's like trying to sell Linux dev ops software by asking a top 40 radio station to play ads for it after specific songs.

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

#408

Post by magicalhippo » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

badwolf wrote: post #139

rusk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience of targeted advertising is Amazon trying to sell me things I’ve already bought ...

This is a point I bring up when casually talking with non-tech minded friends when they start talking about machine learning taking over everything... I bought a Dyson last summer. Amazon is still suggesting that I buy more vacuum cleaners.

This also puzzles me. If I buy a household appliance that's not a consumable product (most shouldn't be), why does it recommend more of the exact same? Why doesn't it instead recommend other types of appliances?

The key take-away should be that you're comfortable with buying household appliances online, usually not that you need another vacuum cleaner within the next year.

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

#409

Post by bsznjyewgd » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 3:07 AM UTC

jrobn wrote: post #371

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…

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 purchased products/services off of ads, but only because I was directly searching to buy those things and they came up as sponsored results. I'm not sure if that counts.

I have never bought off of ads otherwise and find that most of the time they are not relevant to my interests. I also started using an adblocker because of other reasons (mal-ads/autoplay) even though I previously did not do so because I felt text/banner ads were quite acceptable in order to help keep the lights on.

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

#410

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 3:12 AM UTC

kiriakasis wrote: post #385

seem_2211 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But also, if it's general interest that makes sense as well. Say an ad for BestBuy while browsing the NYT. That's one of the benefits of well trafficked sites - you can reach a pretty wide swath of the population.

In this sense I would like it if site took advertisement more seriously. Asking feedback, allowing personalization, selecting a few "endorsed" ads (as a quick and cheap Boolean review). For Google and Facebook it doesn't make sense, but for a newspaper i would expect some selection on the ads they show.

BTW Stackoverflow does many of these things with their ads.