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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

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-sheet describing most data sources. Few pubs can afford a direct sales team facing the EU, but I think most publishers would jump at the chance to have direct revenue and pull ad exchanges in a heartbeat. Policing exchanges for malware and junk creative is a full time job publishers shouldn't have to do, but ultimately they are held accountable for whatever the exchanges pushes their way.

SilasX 8y ago
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 the ad precision (contra the conventional wisdom of "lol I'm only marketing to people with the latest hardware anyway").
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  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.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Yes, and I was acknowledging that and addressing the broader implication of whether this means it could/would never be worth the money, or was just an artifact of advertisers currently overcharging for it even when there's a lower amount they could charge while maintaining profitability and keeping the higher RoR.

SilasX 8y ago

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 the ad precision (contra the conventional wisdom of "lol I'm only marketing to people with the latest hardware anyway").

SiempreViernes 8y ago
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.
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yes, and I was acknowledging that and addressing the broader implication of whether this means it could/would never be worth the money, or was just an artifact of advertisers currently overcharging for it even when there's a lower amount they could charge while maintaining profitability and keeping the higher RoR.