6 ms·

Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors? What changed in the landscape that this is no longer possible?

by js8 8y ago

triviatise 8y ago
how will you have ads that follow you around the internet?
marcell 8y ago
It’s more effective to target visitors. For example if you are male, you never need to see a tampon ad, even if you’re reading Cosmo.
- adrianN 8y ago
  My girlfriend bought several menstrual cups because I heard about them on the Internet and suggested them to her.
  - dahdum 8y ago
    There are always untracked situations like that, but the ROAS for your demographic will so drastically different it’s like throwing money in the garbage to target you.
    - pluma 8y ago
      How likely is a man reading Cosmo to care about tampons vs cups relative to the average man? How likely is a Cosmo reader to be a cis man? Alternatively: How likely is a Cosmo reader reading an article about menstruation to be interested in a female hygiene product? The death of tracking-based ad targeting doesn't mean you have to show the same ads everywhere like an animal. You can still make the ads contextually relevant. And you don't even need to disguise them as native content (which, btw, is illegal in some EU countries already).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Someone should just invent a standard cookie that people can use if they are comfortable with it and that’s all ads can see. I’m comfortable telling advertisers my age group, gender, 3 hobbies and my zip code. I’m not comfortable with ad networks deducing those very same parameters from my browsing habits.
  - lotu 8y ago
    That is an awesome idea! I really like it, one thing I do know if you dig in the the ad settings for most provides you can find a page where they display this info and you can edit it. Unfortunately short of some type of mandate I don't see how this could work, because it would be next to impossible to get 90% of the population to fallout the cookie. My company actually did a bunch of research on collecting consent from users to show personalized ads, (aka what everyone is doing right now) Only 25% of the the users read the 3 sentences before clicking on a selection. 25% did not read anything many thought our privacy dialog was in fact an ad. :( Many people said they didn't want personalized ads because they thought it would mean filling out a survey like the one you just described even though it obviously (to us) did not. One person actually said, "I'm okay with them using my browser history to show ads but, I don't want them to use my personal data like my banking records or my medical history." This is very ironic because we presented the option to do exactly what they wanted by they didn't understand what it was because they did not consider the browser data to be "personal". I really wish that when you first opened a browser their was a dialog about hey these or the things you need to know about how we pay for the internet. Though I have no idea how get to that spot.
    - feanaro 8y ago
      > I really wish that when you first opened a browser their was a dialog about hey these or the things you need to know about how we pay for the internet. Though I have no idea how get to that spot. This sounds horrible, sorry.
- pluma 8y ago
  Unless you're trans. Or you're doing the family shopping and aren't grossed out by hygiene products.
cm2012 8y ago
Most content people read is not directly related to a commercial purpose.
zdragnar 8y ago
1) The correlation between the content people peruse and the products people buy is pretty poor. Take a news site with an article about school shootings- what related content would they advertise? Guns? Back to school supplies? Without knowing why a person is on a page, it's difficult to understand what related products might appeal to them. 2) Tracking user behavior is fairly important to implement click fraud detection- obviously that doesn't justify shady behavior on the part of ad networks, nor does it necessitate the in-depth amount of personally identifying information they may or may not collect. However, some forms of that data- think IP addresses, click history- may be useful. 3) If you already have some data per point 2, why would you waste an opportunity to display something meaningful by putting up an ad that might be completely irrelevant given what you happen to know already? None of this is meant to justify targeted ads, only to explain why they have better appeal to both content providers and ad networks.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > what related content would they advertise? Guns? Back to school supplies? Without knowing why a person is on a page, it's difficult to understand what related products might appeal to them. Training for teachers? Security services? Access control systems? Yes, a lot of those reading are parents, not teachers, but what do you think they'll do if they are convinced something exists that will reduce the risk of school shootings? Editing: ad "targeting" as it has existed so far has also been insultingly, embarrassingly bad IMO. Even Google tried for years to send me ads for Russian, Ukrainian, Philippine and Thai dating sites. Round robin. I was delighted when they started showing me Wordpress ads. Those are not relevant either but now we are approaching something useful and not actively insulting (I'm very happily married and have small kids.)
  - js8 8y ago
    I think you're right about the targeted ads. Many people have expressed similar sentiment. I suspect that most advertising is actually driven by supply (that is, somebody wants to advertise X), not demand (somebody needing Y at the moment), and that's why targeting doesn't really work that well, and the disadvantage of untargeted ads (or targeted by content) is much smaller than advertising industry claims.
Spooky23 8y ago
The market is too segmented for broad interest ads to work, and advertisers don’t want to deal with multiple content channels. Plus, the editorial quality of ads is generally so awful, so you need to align with the users interests to help them accidentally click on it in many cases. The newspaper was a beautiful business. They had a monopoly or minimal competition, and a critical mass that supported everything from classified ads to flyers to the pet store.
downandout 8y ago
Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors? Native ads do this. It's a huge industry, and will likely get far bigger under GDPR. But it takes highly specialized techniques to make the numbers back out as an advertiser. There's a ton of fraud, the bidding strategy is very different from programmatic/retargeting, the ads that work are different, etc. Most of the ad industry doesn't know how to do this, and many types of ads simply won't be profitable on native networks. From what I'm hearing from my friends that do ecommerce stuff, product ads targeted to the EU are no longer profitable across the board either. That will force a ton of review sites aimed at EU visitors to shutdown, along with many YouTube reviewers. As advertisers pull product ads out of the major ad networks because they can't make money, the revenue of publishers/content creators in the product review space will plummet in lockstep. Amazon has cut affiliate commissions to the point where turning to them is no longer an option for any site that costs money to maintain either. GDPR seems to be on track to wipe out vast swaths of businesses serving the EU market, and not just the "evil" ones it was trying to wipe out. It's a shitshow, but it was entirely predictable.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  Maybe, but ad prices going down, Amazon cutting affiliation commissions, clickbait race to the bottom etc. has happened over a period of the last ten years anyway and is unrelated to GDPR. It hasn't exactly resulted in quality content, or financial stability for content creators, either. A situation where your average page contains tens of tracking scripts wasn't sustainable much longer. If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market.
  - downandout 8y ago
    If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market. The problem is that the market itself is shrinking (as we speak) as a result of GDPR. There won't be much of a market left to disrupt. Ad targeting got as invasive as it did because that was the only way to make it profitable. The moment that ads stop becoming profitable, advertisers will pull out. This won't be gradual thing for most companies - this will be a next week type of thing. Few companies can afford to light money on fire in the form of ad spend if they can't recoup it. Some ads might still work in the EU, but it will be a dramatically smaller market within a month or two.
tjoff 8y ago
Google can't do it. Everyone else will be fine.
- lotu 8y ago
  I'm confused by your comment are you saying diffrent rules should apply to Google vs other companies or are you saying Google lack the engineering talent to comply and everyone else has it. The former is a deeply troubling form of government that leads (in my view anvetiablly) to corruption and abuse of power. The latter is plain backwards Google has the resources to be profitable under any regulatory regime it is small companies that don't.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    The latter, because it doesn't scale. Google is just a middleman that with the help of tracking sells lots of badly targetted ads cheaply. Google doesn't care for stuff that cannot be automated to a large degree. Now without tracking you have to actually understand the audience and the product, this research will make advertising more expensive but also in many cases have better success. And suddenly there is no reason to rely on google.
jdietrich 8y ago
High quality, highly relevant content just became a lot more valuable. I subscribe to Sound on Sound, a magazine about music technology. I pay them $90 a year, but I also whitelist them in my ad blocker, because the ads complement the content. If I'm reading a review of a synthesizer or an article about how to record electric guitars, it's really easy to serve relevant ads with good click-through and conversion rates without intensive tracking. Both the content and the advertising serve to enhance my enjoyment of a hobby that I care deeply about. A lot of publishers are really going to struggle post-GDPR, because their content is clickbaity and vapid. It isn't worth paying for and it isn't relevant to the readers' lives. It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online. Some good publishers are going to get caught in the crossfire which is unfortunate, but I think that the overall effect will be net positive. If publishers can't sell their ad inventory without recourse to surveillance, they need to seriously examine whether their business model is honorable and whether they are offering something of real value.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  >It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online. Yep, I really hope that the law incentivizes businesses to really add value by producing better content rather than turning up the frequency and hitting everybody with addictive clickbait.
  - davidgerard 8y ago
    Note that the Guardian no-paywall beg for subscribers model can work surprisingly well - they've got 300,000 subscribers and another 500,000 more casual donors: http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-found-800000-paying-readers http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-f... I run a critical news blog about blockchains and I get about $200/mo on Patreon on this model. It's not a living, but it's a nice extra indeed. I am delighted to answer publishers who go "but how can we live without spyware-level ads!!" with "have you tried not sucking?" (I whitelist a few sites, e.g. LWN.net, and I don't block ads from the Project Wonderful network. If you don't suck, I might let you through!)
mortehu 8y ago
Google's main ad products, AdWords and AdSense, are content based. For many advertisers, this has always been the best type of targeting. E.g. some hotel in Toronto may advertise on the search engine results page when you search for "hotels in Toronto", or view a video about things to do in Toronto.
- C14L 8y ago
  That's incorrect. AdSense was content based. They switched to "individual user interest" based many years ago. Its only now, after GDPR, that you finally have an option to switch back to content based ads, but sadly "for EEA users" only.
  - mortehu 8y ago
    I can only find sources that contradict you. Do you have a source for that?

Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors? What changed in the landscape that this is no longer possible?

by js8 8y ago

Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors? What changed in the landscape that this is no longer possible?

triviatise 8y ago

how will you have ads that follow you around the internet?

marcell 8y ago

It’s more effective to target visitors. For example if you are male, you never need to see a tampon ad, even if you’re reading Cosmo.

adrianN 8y ago
My girlfriend bought several menstrual cups because I heard about them on the Internet and suggested them to her.
- dahdum 8y ago
  There are always untracked situations like that, but the ROAS for your demographic will so drastically different it’s like throwing money in the garbage to target you.
  - pluma 8y ago
    How likely is a man reading Cosmo to care about tampons vs cups relative to the average man? How likely is a Cosmo reader to be a cis man? Alternatively: How likely is a Cosmo reader reading an article about menstruation to be interested in a female hygiene product? The death of tracking-based ad targeting doesn't mean you have to show the same ads everywhere like an animal. You can still make the ads contextually relevant. And you don't even need to disguise them as native content (which, btw, is illegal in some EU countries already).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alkonaut 8y ago
Someone should just invent a standard cookie that people can use if they are comfortable with it and that’s all ads can see. I’m comfortable telling advertisers my age group, gender, 3 hobbies and my zip code. I’m not comfortable with ad networks deducing those very same parameters from my browsing habits.
- lotu 8y ago
  That is an awesome idea! I really like it, one thing I do know if you dig in the the ad settings for most provides you can find a page where they display this info and you can edit it. Unfortunately short of some type of mandate I don't see how this could work, because it would be next to impossible to get 90% of the population to fallout the cookie. My company actually did a bunch of research on collecting consent from users to show personalized ads, (aka what everyone is doing right now) Only 25% of the the users read the 3 sentences before clicking on a selection. 25% did not read anything many thought our privacy dialog was in fact an ad. :( Many people said they didn't want personalized ads because they thought it would mean filling out a survey like the one you just described even though it obviously (to us) did not. One person actually said, "I'm okay with them using my browser history to show ads but, I don't want them to use my personal data like my banking records or my medical history." This is very ironic because we presented the option to do exactly what they wanted by they didn't understand what it was because they did not consider the browser data to be "personal". I really wish that when you first opened a browser their was a dialog about hey these or the things you need to know about how we pay for the internet. Though I have no idea how get to that spot.
  - feanaro 8y ago
    > I really wish that when you first opened a browser their was a dialog about hey these or the things you need to know about how we pay for the internet. Though I have no idea how get to that spot. This sounds horrible, sorry.
pluma 8y ago
Unless you're trans. Or you're doing the family shopping and aren't grossed out by hygiene products.

cm2012 8y ago

Most content people read is not directly related to a commercial purpose.

zdragnar 8y ago

1) The correlation between the content people peruse and the products people buy is pretty poor. Take a news site with an article about school shootings- what related content would they advertise? Guns? Back to school supplies? Without knowing why a person is on a page, it's difficult to understand what related products might appeal to them. 2) Tracking user behavior is fairly important to implement click fraud detection- obviously that doesn't justify shady behavior on the part of ad networks, nor does it necessitate the in-depth amount of personally identifying information they may or may not collect. However, some forms of that data- think IP addresses, click history- may be useful. 3) If you already have some data per point 2, why would you waste an opportunity to display something meaningful by putting up an ad that might be completely irrelevant given what you happen to know already? None of this is meant to justify targeted ads, only to explain why they have better appeal to both content providers and ad networks.

reitanqild 8y ago
> what related content would they advertise? Guns? Back to school supplies? Without knowing why a person is on a page, it's difficult to understand what related products might appeal to them. Training for teachers? Security services? Access control systems? Yes, a lot of those reading are parents, not teachers, but what do you think they'll do if they are convinced something exists that will reduce the risk of school shootings? Editing: ad "targeting" as it has existed so far has also been insultingly, embarrassingly bad IMO. Even Google tried for years to send me ads for Russian, Ukrainian, Philippine and Thai dating sites. Round robin. I was delighted when they started showing me Wordpress ads. Those are not relevant either but now we are approaching something useful and not actively insulting (I'm very happily married and have small kids.)
- js8 8y ago
  I think you're right about the targeted ads. Many people have expressed similar sentiment. I suspect that most advertising is actually driven by supply (that is, somebody wants to advertise X), not demand (somebody needing Y at the moment), and that's why targeting doesn't really work that well, and the disadvantage of untargeted ads (or targeted by content) is much smaller than advertising industry claims.

Spooky23 8y ago

The market is too segmented for broad interest ads to work, and advertisers don’t want to deal with multiple content channels. Plus, the editorial quality of ads is generally so awful, so you need to align with the users interests to help them accidentally click on it in many cases. The newspaper was a beautiful business. They had a monopoly or minimal competition, and a critical mass that supported everything from classified ads to flyers to the pet store.

downandout 8y ago

Can someone ELI5 to me why we can't simply have ads targeted to content instead of to visitors? Native ads do this. It's a huge industry, and will likely get far bigger under GDPR. But it takes highly specialized techniques to make the numbers back out as an advertiser. There's a ton of fraud, the bidding strategy is very different from programmatic/retargeting, the ads that work are different, etc. Most of the ad industry doesn't know how to do this, and many types of ads simply won't be profitable on native networks. From what I'm hearing from my friends that do ecommerce stuff, product ads targeted to the EU are no longer profitable across the board either. That will force a ton of review sites aimed at EU visitors to shutdown, along with many YouTube reviewers. As advertisers pull product ads out of the major ad networks because they can't make money, the revenue of publishers/content creators in the product review space will plummet in lockstep. Amazon has cut affiliate commissions to the point where turning to them is no longer an option for any site that costs money to maintain either. GDPR seems to be on track to wipe out vast swaths of businesses serving the EU market, and not just the "evil" ones it was trying to wipe out. It's a shitshow, but it was entirely predictable.

tannhaeuser 8y ago
Maybe, but ad prices going down, Amazon cutting affiliation commissions, clickbait race to the bottom etc. has happened over a period of the last ten years anyway and is unrelated to GDPR. It hasn't exactly resulted in quality content, or financial stability for content creators, either. A situation where your average page contains tens of tracking scripts wasn't sustainable much longer. If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market.
- downandout 8y ago
  If anything, GDPR should be seen as an opportunity to disrupt the quasi-monopolistic online ad market. The problem is that the market itself is shrinking (as we speak) as a result of GDPR. There won't be much of a market left to disrupt. Ad targeting got as invasive as it did because that was the only way to make it profitable. The moment that ads stop becoming profitable, advertisers will pull out. This won't be gradual thing for most companies - this will be a next week type of thing. Few companies can afford to light money on fire in the form of ad spend if they can't recoup it. Some ads might still work in the EU, but it will be a dramatically smaller market within a month or two.

tjoff 8y ago

Google can't do it. Everyone else will be fine.

lotu 8y ago
I'm confused by your comment are you saying diffrent rules should apply to Google vs other companies or are you saying Google lack the engineering talent to comply and everyone else has it. The former is a deeply troubling form of government that leads (in my view anvetiablly) to corruption and abuse of power. The latter is plain backwards Google has the resources to be profitable under any regulatory regime it is small companies that don't.
- tjoff 8y ago
  The latter, because it doesn't scale. Google is just a middleman that with the help of tracking sells lots of badly targetted ads cheaply. Google doesn't care for stuff that cannot be automated to a large degree. Now without tracking you have to actually understand the audience and the product, this research will make advertising more expensive but also in many cases have better success. And suddenly there is no reason to rely on google.

jdietrich 8y ago

High quality, highly relevant content just became a lot more valuable. I subscribe to Sound on Sound, a magazine about music technology. I pay them $90 a year, but I also whitelist them in my ad blocker, because the ads complement the content. If I'm reading a review of a synthesizer or an article about how to record electric guitars, it's really easy to serve relevant ads with good click-through and conversion rates without intensive tracking. Both the content and the advertising serve to enhance my enjoyment of a hobby that I care deeply about. A lot of publishers are really going to struggle post-GDPR, because their content is clickbaity and vapid. It isn't worth paying for and it isn't relevant to the readers' lives. It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online. Some good publishers are going to get caught in the crossfire which is unfortunate, but I think that the overall effect will be net positive. If publishers can't sell their ad inventory without recourse to surveillance, they need to seriously examine whether their business model is honorable and whether they are offering something of real value.

Barrin92 8y ago
>It exists because it briefly hijacks your attention, which can be profitably monetised by ad networks that invasively track your activities online. Yep, I really hope that the law incentivizes businesses to really add value by producing better content rather than turning up the frequency and hitting everybody with addictive clickbait.
- davidgerard 8y ago
  Note that the Guardian no-paywall beg for subscribers model can work surprisingly well - they've got 300,000 subscribers and another 500,000 more casual donors: http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-found-800000-paying-readers http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2017/10/26/how-the-guardian-f... I run a critical news blog about blockchains and I get about $200/mo on Patreon on this model. It's not a living, but it's a nice extra indeed. I am delighted to answer publishers who go "but how can we live without spyware-level ads!!" with "have you tried not sucking?" (I whitelist a few sites, e.g. LWN.net, and I don't block ads from the Project Wonderful network. If you don't suck, I might let you through!)

mortehu 8y ago

Google's main ad products, AdWords and AdSense, are content based. For many advertisers, this has always been the best type of targeting. E.g. some hotel in Toronto may advertise on the search engine results page when you search for "hotels in Toronto", or view a video about things to do in Toronto.

C14L 8y ago
That's incorrect. AdSense was content based. They switched to "individual user interest" based many years ago. Its only now, after GDPR, that you finally have an option to switch back to content based ads, but sadly "for EEA users" only.
- mortehu 8y ago
  I can only find sources that contradict you. Do you have a source for that?