5 ms·

patio11 had a great back of the envelope calculation awhile ago on this. Turns out showing ads for a fridge right after you just bought one might be highly succ

by dlor 8y ago

patio11 had a great back of the envelope calculation awhile ago on this. Turns out showing ads for a fridge right after you just bought one might be highly successful. Say the average person buys a fridge once every 10-20 years, the probability you're looking for a fridge this month is something like 1/120-1/240, call it .75 percent. Some percentage of fridge purchases end up being returned. Let's say 2 percent of them. If you return a fridge, you pretty much are guaranteed to need a new one, so around 2 percent of people that just purchased a fridge are very likely to buy a new one. That's over double the likelihood of someone that didn't just buy a fridge!

tjoff 8y ago
> ... might be highly successful. Only in the context of the disastrous relevance of tracking. Does tracking earn companies more than it costs users in added electricity? I doubt it.
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I find that extremely unlikely, only because companies aren't entirely stupid, and if MANY companies have started doing that in this space, and since they started it their profits have gone up significantly, it points to this kind of tracking making a significant amount of money. And most of the tracking happens on the server, the client really only keeping some tokens for state and sending them with the requests.
  - tjoff 8y ago
    > only because companies aren't entirely stupid [citation needed] Cents per user is still a lot of money if you have a billion users. Maybe the real value of tracking is the perceived value of tracking? It's a good way to combat competition as tracking requires that you already have a large presence.
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      Until one of us shows some kind of proof, we are both just guessing. Now companies might do dumb stuff, but they don't just continue to grow and dominate by making exclusively bad decisions. Google is built on targeted advertising, and it's paid off for them very well, so it can't be a complete boondoggle. The wikipedia article on targeted advertising says that targeted ads make about 2.7 more money than the alternative. I don't have any numbers on material costs, but I can't imagine it costing users that much in electricity. Still, it is just a guess so if you have anything that shows otherwise I'd love to read it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising

by dlor 8y ago

tjoff 8y ago

> ... might be highly successful. Only in the context of the disastrous relevance of tracking. Does tracking earn companies more than it costs users in added electricity? I doubt it.

Klathmon 8y ago
I find that extremely unlikely, only because companies aren't entirely stupid, and if MANY companies have started doing that in this space, and since they started it their profits have gone up significantly, it points to this kind of tracking making a significant amount of money. And most of the tracking happens on the server, the client really only keeping some tokens for state and sending them with the requests.
- tjoff 8y ago
  > only because companies aren't entirely stupid [citation needed] Cents per user is still a lot of money if you have a billion users. Maybe the real value of tracking is the perceived value of tracking? It's a good way to combat competition as tracking requires that you already have a large presence.
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    Until one of us shows some kind of proof, we are both just guessing. Now companies might do dumb stuff, but they don't just continue to grow and dominate by making exclusively bad decisions. Google is built on targeted advertising, and it's paid off for them very well, so it can't be a complete boondoggle. The wikipedia article on targeted advertising says that targeted ads make about 2.7 more money than the alternative. I don't have any numbers on material costs, but I can't imagine it costing users that much in electricity. Still, it is just a guess so if you have anything that shows otherwise I'd love to read it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising