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The other option is to target the ads to the publication. As long as the publication is on a niche topic or geographically localized, you can choose ads that wi

The other option is to target the ads to the publication. As long as the publication is on a niche topic or geographically localized, you can choose ads that will likely interest people (local restaurants) without needing to track them. Tracking is only necessary when the ad venue is incredibly broad across topics and geography.

badrabbit 9y ago
I have been wondering why that isn't done more often myself. I mean,it isn't like tv ads didn't work.
- antonvs 9y ago
  Advertising is very much beset by the mindset of being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should" (Jurassic Park.) Tracking and microtargeting just seem too attractive for advertisers to pass up. Same goes for large size, autoplay, multimedia ads. These mechanisms would have to fail to perform in obvious ways (not long-term, subtle, whole-market ways) before people will stop using them.
Feniks 9y ago
That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you have to invest in personal relations with advertisers. New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.
- ar0 9y ago
  In fact, that’s how Google started out with AdSense as well: It was called “content targeting advertising”, because Google scanned your webpage and then served ads that related to the content of your webpage. I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.
  - shostack 9y ago
    What happened is the ad landscape shifted from targeting placements and content to targeting audiences and where they are in their journey to purchase. It simply performs better for advertisers and it's often more scalable. In turn, this makes the platform more money because sites that may have low value inventory can suddenly be sold for higher CPMs if an advertiser for example wants to bid on their retargeting data in the auction. It let's them price based on people.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  More like "for about 150 years". Advertising, in the modern sense, is, well, modern. You pretty much simply did not have goods to advertise (or the means to advertise them) other than for very specific items -- think classifieds rather than bulk and mass advertising. The rise of the factory system, of transport networks, and the capacity to create far more of a good than local demand could absorb created the first modern-style advertising in about 1860. The first prominently-featured adverts were the 19th century equivalents of Viagra ads: mostly-ineffective patent medicines. Hamilton Holt has a delightful contemporary account of this, written (and presented as a lecture, it's short) in 1909, looking back on the previous 50 years or so of publishing history. I cannot recommend it highly enough. https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
FridgeSeal 9y ago
As someone who used to work trafficking ads and spends a lot of time blocking them myself, I'm of the opinion that this is the approach to take. ReadTheDocs and sites like BikeRadar are my favourite examples: If I go to a bike site, I expect the ads I see to be about bike stuff. If I'm on a technical site (like Stack Overflow or ReadTheDocs) I expect to see ads about related technical topics. Unfortunately the advertising industry has gone down the route of hyper-invasive, user-data focused advertising, for what I consider to be very little benefit to either publishers or users. The only people who benefit are those who pedal the tech that enables this market. With all the ML tools available to us now, I'm not sure why we couldn't build tools that accurately match ad content to site content. You don't need to invasively track users users this way either, because you only ever need to be concerned with the topic of the site/article and not who's seeing it.
- techdragon 9y ago
  We could build these things, but part of the "advertising host" optimisation metrics is "time to ad display" so the algorithms in use are frequently "deliberately dumb" for reasons of optimising the time involved in deciding what advertising should be displayed.
  - sdenton4 9y ago
    Somehow, televisions had the miraculous ability to display content-targeted ads with no user knowledge and zero latency... It's much easier to target the publication than the individual user.
  - FridgeSeal 9y ago
    Web pages are far more static than users, your adserver/ML/analysis tool need only analyse the page once (not including updates for content changes) and then pass this information straight on to ad buyers. Even if advertisers analysed the page content on seeing it, rather than the publisher, it would still be net faster than doing lookups/analysis per adserve (as you would when you target a user). I don't think it would be hard at all to build something which analysed a page and made an adserving decision with a lower "time to ad display" than a similar process that used user data.

badrabbit 9y ago

I have been wondering why that isn't done more often myself. I mean,it isn't like tv ads didn't work.

antonvs 9y ago
Advertising is very much beset by the mindset of being "so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should" (Jurassic Park.) Tracking and microtargeting just seem too attractive for advertisers to pass up. Same goes for large size, autoplay, multimedia ads. These mechanisms would have to fail to perform in obvious ways (not long-term, subtle, whole-market ways) before people will stop using them.

Feniks 9y ago

That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you have to invest in personal relations with advertisers. New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.

ar0 9y ago
In fact, that’s how Google started out with AdSense as well: It was called “content targeting advertising”, because Google scanned your webpage and then served ads that related to the content of your webpage. I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.
- shostack 9y ago
  What happened is the ad landscape shifted from targeting placements and content to targeting audiences and where they are in their journey to purchase. It simply performs better for advertisers and it's often more scalable. In turn, this makes the platform more money because sites that may have low value inventory can suddenly be sold for higher CPMs if an advertiser for example wants to bid on their retargeting data in the auction. It let's them price based on people.
dredmorbius 9y ago
More like "for about 150 years". Advertising, in the modern sense, is, well, modern. You pretty much simply did not have goods to advertise (or the means to advertise them) other than for very specific items -- think classifieds rather than bulk and mass advertising. The rise of the factory system, of transport networks, and the capacity to create far more of a good than local demand could absorb created the first modern-style advertising in about 1860. The first prominently-featured adverts were the 19th century equivalents of Viagra ads: mostly-ineffective patent medicines. Hamilton Holt has a delightful contemporary account of this, written (and presented as a lecture, it's short) in 1909, looking back on the previous 50 years or so of publishing history. I cannot recommend it highly enough. https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...

FridgeSeal 9y ago

As someone who used to work trafficking ads and spends a lot of time blocking them myself, I'm of the opinion that this is the approach to take. ReadTheDocs and sites like BikeRadar are my favourite examples: If I go to a bike site, I expect the ads I see to be about bike stuff. If I'm on a technical site (like Stack Overflow or ReadTheDocs) I expect to see ads about related technical topics. Unfortunately the advertising industry has gone down the route of hyper-invasive, user-data focused advertising, for what I consider to be very little benefit to either publishers or users. The only people who benefit are those who pedal the tech that enables this market. With all the ML tools available to us now, I'm not sure why we couldn't build tools that accurately match ad content to site content. You don't need to invasively track users users this way either, because you only ever need to be concerned with the topic of the site/article and not who's seeing it.

techdragon 9y ago
We could build these things, but part of the "advertising host" optimisation metrics is "time to ad display" so the algorithms in use are frequently "deliberately dumb" for reasons of optimising the time involved in deciding what advertising should be displayed.
- sdenton4 9y ago
  Somehow, televisions had the miraculous ability to display content-targeted ads with no user knowledge and zero latency... It's much easier to target the publication than the individual user.
- FridgeSeal 9y ago
  Web pages are far more static than users, your adserver/ML/analysis tool need only analyse the page once (not including updates for content changes) and then pass this information straight on to ad buyers. Even if advertisers analysed the page content on seeing it, rather than the publisher, it would still be net faster than doing lookups/analysis per adserve (as you would when you target a user). I don't think it would be hard at all to build something which analysed a page and made an adserving decision with a lower "time to ad display" than a similar process that used user data.