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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

#61

Post by rock_hard »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
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 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…

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is!

We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion.

Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it!

Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.

But I agree that targeted ads (as primitive as they are) are more efficient then I untargeted ads

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

#62

Post by SiempreViernes »

SilasX wrote: post #54
reilly3000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ad industry mostly already knows that. I would pay $4-6 CPM to run a behavioral campaign that barely filled and rarely performed. It was almost always more efficient to be at $0.75 cpm with simple contextual targeting, ie. publisher reported content category against a tight site list. The data is pretty much shit, and the way its sourced is fully opaque to the advertiser. It was pulling teeth to even find a one-s…

Good points, but that doesn't mean targeting is ineffective, only that they currently charge too much for it (and some ad sellers hide behind undisclosed flaky algorithms for doing so). I'd be interested in knowing if there are other effects: if you remove targeting, does that also mean you're turning off the extreme bloat on sites? If so, I can totally believe that costing you enough users to kill the value added by…

Maybe you mean targeting does have an effect, but the poster you replied to explicitly stated it wasn't worth the money: it was an ineffective way to spend money.

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

#63

Post by detaro »

wlesieutre wrote: post #55
jarfil wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst kind of targeting is when I go to a website, browse some similar items comparing their features and price, buy one... and now you decide to show me ads about those same products for the next week even if it should be clear that I've already made up my mind (I'm looking at you, Amazon).

Customers who bought this television also bought: 1) different television 2) another television 3) alternate listing of the same television and 4x the price because it's controlled by some idiot algorithm 4) more television 5) yet another television Suuuuure they did

One possible explanation I've heard (of which I have no idea if it is true) for both this and ads showing after you've made a big purchase is that people actually are somewhat more likely to buy an appliance close to another purchase of one, since they only buy them a) after several years, if the previous one has broken or is outdated, or b) shortly after they bought another one, which they returned for some reason.

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

#64

Post by manigandham »

I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars.

There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less money in the overall market.

This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players (advertisers and publishers). EDIT: curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here.

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

#65

Post by rusk »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
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 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…

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

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

#67

Post by manigandham »

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.

This has nothing to do with effectiveness of targeting. It's about advertisers having no data to target so they do bigger blind ad deals and deal with fewer but bigger publishers.

It's why TV ads are so expensive and wasteful, but lucrative for networks.

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

#68

Post by reitanqild »

buboard wrote: post #46
detaro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do weird niche websites need more tracking? I'd assume their user base is way more specific, and thus can be targeted better without needing tracking. That I visit the NYT tells you way less about my interests than that I'm reading your blog about aquarium filters.

this logic (barely) works for blogs. if your game is an aquarium game, it doesn't mean that your users are only interested in aquarium cleaning products.

> if your game is an aquarium game, it doesn't mean that your users are only interested in aquarium cleaning products.

Correct.

On the other hand, the topic of the game is just one of the contexts. A trivial example:

At least we can infer that the player likes to play games, so advertising for mobile games, discount gaming consoles etc might be a better match.

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

#70

Post by codq »

rock_hard wrote: post #61
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…

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.…

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here.

When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

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