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However, I have concerns about the economic efficiency (broadly speaking), as well as the dynamic optimality of advertising (though, admittedly, this is a second order concern to me!).
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This makes sense to me. If you are targeting me, I have told you I like it, and therefore don't need you to tell me about it.
That sounds vastly oversimplified. So you’ve discovered that I’m into hiking/camping gear. That doesn’t mean I will never buy another piece of outdoor gear or that I have heard of every brand and product in that category.
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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.
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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
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Say what you want, but sweaters don't spy on people.
Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we stopped serving ads." I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consu…
We don't have to bring down software development down along with adtech. We can shift the software engineers to doing something non-malicious. Salaries may go down a bit, as there aren't many other sources of easy money beyond ads.
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?
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
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The Times has a large readership and potential ad draw in the E.U. Regulations would have to be ridiculous to make it unprofitable for the Times to abandon Europe. The Los Angeles Times , on the other hand, has few European users. The fixed cost of re-tooling (or, if already in compliance, even just accepting the regulatory risk) would be difficult to justify relative to other potential investments.
It's either a one-time investment, or a permanent loss of a (perhaps small) part of your users. Perhaps it doesn't make sense for the LA Times, but I'm wondering how large the investment really is and whether or not it would start getting worth it if you look at (say) 3 or 5 year periods.
It's a market targeting and opportunity cost question. Yes, many of Apple's consumers are probably high-priced wine consumers. And yes, winemaking is a profitable business. That doesn't mean, however, that Apple serves its interests by expanding into wine.
It's promising, though, that we now have data showing psychotic targeting practices are unnecessary. Perhaps, even inefficient.
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…
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…
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?
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.
What would you rather have people do?