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All this effort to distill user behavior and user intent from logs... why not just ask them????? I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to

All this effort to distill user behavior and user intent from logs... why not just ask them????? I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to see. I want to see movie trailers, something that I rarely see now because I don't watch TV. I want to see new video games. I want to see new books, what sports event are going on, etc. Why not ask me? It's literally not rocket science here but billions are spent on machine learning, clicks, storing exabytes of data or more trying to figure this shit out. Just ask me for fuck's sake, I'm more than willing to watch ads in exchange for a useful service!

hakfoo 7y ago
The problem is there's a huge trust gap on both sides. The advertisers figure that self-reported data may be faulty. In some cases it could be-- either maliciously ("I'm 92 years old and spend $600 per month on my phone bill!") or by omission ("I hadn't even thought about it, but my lease is up in 3 months and high-yielding car ads might well be useful for me") Consumers won't be easily convinced they're being taken seriously-- if they have to go out of their way to customize ads, and then see equal or more ads than before, or non-laser-focused ads, their trust goes out the window. It's also going to be difficult to stand out in a sea of banners and say "we're the high quality ad you customized... right next to 32 click-your-state-for-mortgage-broker-lead-arbitrage banners." I suspect there may also be a third distrust-- between ad networks and advertisers. If you ran ads for a product only on a really targeted audience, the figures may not look compelling to buyers. It might look better to say "This $10k ad campaign landed in front of one million weakly targeted eyeballs... and generated 40 sales" than to say "We spent $10k on a super-premium media blitz that hit 200 hand-selected individuals and sold 45 units."
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  If there’s really a trust issue on the offer side (advertisers) then why is YouTube asking survey questions about my demographics and related nonsense? I am a consumer and I don’t want the cognitive pollution associated with having images and sound shoved in my face. Full stop. Separately, worth mentioning, is the fact that the idea of introducing purposeful limitations deliberately to get people to pay more is also evil (I can play YouTube on my desktop and switch tabs, and on iOS for ex. it stops playback so you can buy YouTube Red). EDIT: Offer side/bid side is ambiguous since the model is “inverted” with advertising. I’m leaving my comment as is, but its probably better to say “bid side” in this specific case.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    > Separately, worth mentioning, is the fact that the idea of introducing purposeful limitations deliberately to get people to pay more is also evil (I can play YouTube on my desktop and switch tabs, and on iOS for ex. it stops playback so you can buy YouTube Red). This is a fascinating claim to me. Selling access to a service is presumably okay, but having a limited-features version available for free use is "evil"?
    - shakna 7y ago
      It isn't the access to the service that is evil. Rather, that you get a lesser service on a different platform unless you pay. Consumers expect the same experience regardless of platform. When that experience is free on some platforms but paid on another, it frustrates.
      - rusk 7y ago
        ability to use on different platforms = a feature
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Feature or bug, that's ultimately up for the market to decide.
        rusk 7y ago
        Pretty sure the market has adjudicated on YouTube at this stage LOL
        chownie 7y ago
        It's weird to me to call this a feature, a few years ago it was a given. YouTube had to go out of their way to break playback on mobile to offer this "feature". I consider it a bug they've added purposefully and they request each user pay for.
- bluGill 7y ago
  Sales have a long tale. I recently bought a widget I saw advertised 3 years ago but didn't need until now. My parents still buy a sauce because the company ran a great at 25 years ago (the sauce is good, but they haven't tried the competitors).
gwbas1c 7y ago
Honestly, I want a subscription service that allows me to see most major websites without ads. I think someday someone's going to realize just how silly the advertisement game is, and as long as the payment structure is in place, we can get a much better web experience. For example, may of us pay a small monthly fee for Netflix. I'm sure that a small monthly fee could add up to more than what most sites make from ads.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I could easily some universal way of paying to not see ads could be both more profitable for websites and less expensive for me. Because what I'm currently paying for mobile data and bandwidth at home in order to compensate for all the waste introduced by telemetry and ads probably amounts to a good bit more than what websites are making by serving me ads. But at this point the trust is so broken that I probably wouldn't pay for it even if it did exist. Because I'd expect whatever beacon is being used to say, "Paid up, don't serve ads" to just be used as another way to de-anonymize me by the less scrupulous advertisers. Which, as far as I can tell at this point, is pretty much all advertisers.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Yeah, that seems to mostly be a coordination problem. As in, I'd pay $X/month for something that does that for most sites I frequent. But I'll never sign up for 100 different sites individually. Same thing for newspapers.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yes! Exactly! As I understand it, sites don't earn very much from each ad view. So to get substantial income, they need lots of traffic and ad views. And this gets implemented through a hugely complex process of real-time data sharing and bidding. It's ~transparent if you have a fast uplink. But if you're using Tor browser, you can watch it play out, all too slowly. So just replace that complex process with a simpler process of identifying the subscription service that the user employs, and adding the page view to their tab. In order to match current income from ads, the cost per page view would likely be very small. Perhaps $0.01-$0.10. And there could be a mechanism for adjusting that cost based on the local cost of living of a given user. Perhaps through a parameter pushed by the subscription service, which it would obtain in some more-or-less anonymous fashion.
ThrustVectoring 7y ago
>I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to see. This is not the revenue-maximizing ad. Expected value for the company buying the ad is proportional to the product of conversion value and likelihood to convert. "Ads that I want to see" corresponds to the latter, but is completely uncorrelated to the former. For example, advertisers would rather sell a 1% chance of generating a valuable asbestos lawsuit lead than a 100% chance of generating a $2 lunch restaurant lead.
crazygringo 7y ago
I've gotta say, I agree. I don't ever need to see car ads, because I live in NYC. Nor for medications for conditions <x, y, z> which I don't have. Nor for that Amazon product which I already bought. I am so happy to spend three minutes filling out my interests profile. In fact, I already did it for Google when someone pointed out you can. But for all the many ads served by other ad networks, no dice. :(
- xfitm3 7y ago
  You can also run ublock and never see ads.
Porthos9K 7y ago
If they asked me, I would tell them that there is no such thing as a relevant ad. Even if I'm shopping for a specific product, if an ad gets through my defenses I stop shopping. If I see an ad for your brand, I will avoid your brand.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Pretty much. Ads tell me that something exists. I don't entirely reject products whose ads I happen to see, but I do rate them inversely proportional to the scope of their claims. And it's not just obvious ads. You can't trust online customer reviews, because there's an industry devoted to spamming them, both positively and negatively. And you can't trust third-party reviews, because they're often disguised press releases. Or biased by payment. For example, I've been told that many sites that review VPN services basically auction their rating slots.
  - craydandy 7y ago
    Negative reviews are also used put down competitors' products, blackmail free products or services, and in so many other ways that only humans can invent. The reviews are less reliable every passing year. Some platforms have awakened to this, so they have rules or guides what to do when customer tries to blackmail free stuff with negative reviews. However, not all.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    The most useful ads are for something I didn't even know existed before seeing it. I've often bought things to improve my life that before seeing the ad I didn't know existed.
- majewsky 7y ago
  You'll have a hard time shopping for groceries then. Besides displays with ads on them, brands pay big money for preferential placement on shopping aisles. Same for the order of product listings on Amazon etc.
  - 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
Back in the olden days, we'd run ads in programming magazines, because that was our target audience. Lots of people bought those magazines only for the ads for programming products. Heck, I buy hot rod magazines because they have ads from vendors for parts I need. With the web sites I run, I thought it would be a service to users to display ads appropriate to the content of the page. For example, if the page was about bash programming, you might see an ad for a book on bash. But there turned out to be NO WAY to specify a category of ads to run on a site. It was all their algorithm. Hence my sites on programming would keep running ads for "Batman Returns". How utterly pointless and boring. I had a page on the Revolutionary War, and the affiliate ads would be for travel agencies. What would have worked would be books on military history. I eventually gave it up. I.e. the ad should be on-topic to the specific web page, not specific to the reader. Not only would this be much better targeted, gathering profile data on the user would not be helpful.
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  Amazon affiliate is probably the only way. But you need to hand pick everything..
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I did resort to hand picking them for Amazon. Unfortunately, that requires constant attention. Amazon, please let your affiliates at least pick the category! Then use keywords on the web page to pick the product in the category, hopefully at random. Seeing the exact same ad over and over is counterproductive.
- kinleyd 7y ago
  I think your comment is spot on. Have Google et al really missed that, or have they just concluded that individual tracking is better? It seems a pity as focusing on the content being served for ad cues is so obviously how it used to work.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    The holy grail of advertising has always been proving that it works. Delivering one ad that results in a confirmed purchase is much more lucrative than multiple plain page views, or even clicks. The result is twofold: 1- trying to predict who's ready to purchase something, right now. 2- trying to prove someone that's seen an ad actually made a purchase. This is why Gmail for free made sense from day one. What better way to verify a purchase that by having access to emailed receipts. This is also why Google's been buying credit card purchase histories from Visa/MasterCard/banks etc. Separately, there's predicting one of the big life events: college, wedding, baby, home purchase. If I'm remembering correctly, getting a jump over competitors on one of these can be worth hundreds of dollars. There's the story of Target using purchase behavior to try and predict pregnancy, so that they could send targeted / trackable coupons to the expectant mothers. They sent one such packet to a 16 year old girl, who's parents immediately threw a fit about how inappropriate it was, and how dare they accuse their innocent little girl of being promiscuous... Turns out not only was she pregnant, but Target knew before even the girl realized it. The kicker: this was circa 1996. All of this to say, targeted ads might make sense, but proven effectiveness pays more. For that, trackings pretty much required.
dxbydt 7y ago
>why not just ask them????? Mostly because revealed preferences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Revealed preferences are bullshit if you manipulate the environment so that people reveal the "preferences" you want them to reveal.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    They're always bullshit. Even if you don't try to manipulate people all you measure is their current habits.
igornadj 7y ago
Users are notoriously bad at being able to explain what they want, or even knowing what they want. This is why UX/usability studies are the gold standard of delivering value: put a user in front of your tool, give them a task and watch the actual actions they make to complete the task. This has been the norm for decades.
skybrian 7y ago
I don't know about you, but I'm overwhelmed by requests to fill out surveys. Every time I buy anything they want me to fill out a survey or leave a review. I ignore them like spam calls. Figuring out that things went basically okay from logs is much less intrusive. Surveys should be saved for more important things.
on_and_off 7y ago
fwiw, I work for one of these services. For a large consumer app (and actually, that's less and less reserved to the larger apps only), you can expect that every time you see a widget, or tap anywhere in the app, it is going to trigger some kind of analytics log. The goal is not to determine your profile in order to sell you ads but to understand how people use our product (in aggregate). Let's say you have a checkout feature. you need to add an address, payment method and tap checkout. If a significant % of your users bail out of the checkout flow in the address step, there might be something you want to investigate. We also do user studies, they are super useful but are harder to generalize.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
scoutt 7y ago
>> I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to see. It's not about what you like, it's about what you need or think you need. Probably is because your interests change over time. And because they want to profit on what you need today. You might like cars, but you don't buy cars every day, just as me that I don't purchase guitars every week. I think they want to profit from your immediate need, and that requires spying on you, your messages, your browsing history, etc.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Probably is because your interests change over time. They do, and the sites I visit change with them too. Visiting a site about something is as clear and unambiguous signal about my interests as you could possibly get. The reason it's totally disregarded is, I believe, because it's simpler and more profitable to run ad networks as a market. Neither the publisher nor the ad network really care what ads are being run, they care about maximizing profits. And some advertisers (e.g. universally appealing product categories like clothes and movies) can easily outspend niche sellers. As it is today, advertising is an act of malice, so don't expect anyone to care about the user end of the equation. You can get a better ROI by showing more user-aligned ads, but you can also get a better ROI by doubling down on the surveillance capitalism, and the latter requires less coordination.
ThomPete 7y ago
You dont ask users about their intent, you monitor how they behave. Thats how google makes their money.
JadeNB 7y ago
> All this effort to distill user behavior and user intent from logs... why not just ask them????? Because users lie, intentionally and unintentionally?

hakfoo 7y ago

The problem is there's a huge trust gap on both sides. The advertisers figure that self-reported data may be faulty. In some cases it could be-- either maliciously ("I'm 92 years old and spend $600 per month on my phone bill!") or by omission ("I hadn't even thought about it, but my lease is up in 3 months and high-yielding car ads might well be useful for me") Consumers won't be easily convinced they're being taken seriously-- if they have to go out of their way to customize ads, and then see equal or more ads than before, or non-laser-focused ads, their trust goes out the window. It's also going to be difficult to stand out in a sea of banners and say "we're the high quality ad you customized... right next to 32 click-your-state-for-mortgage-broker-lead-arbitrage banners." I suspect there may also be a third distrust-- between ad networks and advertisers. If you ran ads for a product only on a really targeted audience, the figures may not look compelling to buyers. It might look better to say "This $10k ad campaign landed in front of one million weakly targeted eyeballs... and generated 40 sales" than to say "We spent $10k on a super-premium media blitz that hit 200 hand-selected individuals and sold 45 units."

arthurcolle 7y ago
If there’s really a trust issue on the offer side (advertisers) then why is YouTube asking survey questions about my demographics and related nonsense? I am a consumer and I don’t want the cognitive pollution associated with having images and sound shoved in my face. Full stop. Separately, worth mentioning, is the fact that the idea of introducing purposeful limitations deliberately to get people to pay more is also evil (I can play YouTube on my desktop and switch tabs, and on iOS for ex. it stops playback so you can buy YouTube Red). EDIT: Offer side/bid side is ambiguous since the model is “inverted” with advertising. I’m leaving my comment as is, but its probably better to say “bid side” in this specific case.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > Separately, worth mentioning, is the fact that the idea of introducing purposeful limitations deliberately to get people to pay more is also evil (I can play YouTube on my desktop and switch tabs, and on iOS for ex. it stops playback so you can buy YouTube Red). This is a fascinating claim to me. Selling access to a service is presumably okay, but having a limited-features version available for free use is "evil"?
  - shakna 7y ago
    It isn't the access to the service that is evil. Rather, that you get a lesser service on a different platform unless you pay. Consumers expect the same experience regardless of platform. When that experience is free on some platforms but paid on another, it frustrates.
    - rusk 7y ago
      ability to use on different platforms = a feature
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Feature or bug, that's ultimately up for the market to decide.
        rusk 7y ago
        Pretty sure the market has adjudicated on YouTube at this stage LOL
      - chownie 7y ago
        It's weird to me to call this a feature, a few years ago it was a given. YouTube had to go out of their way to break playback on mobile to offer this "feature". I consider it a bug they've added purposefully and they request each user pay for.
bluGill 7y ago
Sales have a long tale. I recently bought a widget I saw advertised 3 years ago but didn't need until now. My parents still buy a sauce because the company ran a great at 25 years ago (the sauce is good, but they haven't tried the competitors).

gwbas1c 7y ago

Honestly, I want a subscription service that allows me to see most major websites without ads. I think someday someone's going to realize just how silly the advertisement game is, and as long as the payment structure is in place, we can get a much better web experience. For example, may of us pay a small monthly fee for Netflix. I'm sure that a small monthly fee could add up to more than what most sites make from ads.

mumblemumble 7y ago
I could easily some universal way of paying to not see ads could be both more profitable for websites and less expensive for me. Because what I'm currently paying for mobile data and bandwidth at home in order to compensate for all the waste introduced by telemetry and ads probably amounts to a good bit more than what websites are making by serving me ads. But at this point the trust is so broken that I probably wouldn't pay for it even if it did exist. Because I'd expect whatever beacon is being used to say, "Paid up, don't serve ads" to just be used as another way to de-anonymize me by the less scrupulous advertisers. Which, as far as I can tell at this point, is pretty much all advertisers.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Yeah, that seems to mostly be a coordination problem. As in, I'd pay $X/month for something that does that for most sites I frequent. But I'll never sign up for 100 different sites individually. Same thing for newspapers.
mirimir 7y ago
Yes! Exactly! As I understand it, sites don't earn very much from each ad view. So to get substantial income, they need lots of traffic and ad views. And this gets implemented through a hugely complex process of real-time data sharing and bidding. It's ~transparent if you have a fast uplink. But if you're using Tor browser, you can watch it play out, all too slowly. So just replace that complex process with a simpler process of identifying the subscription service that the user employs, and adding the page view to their tab. In order to match current income from ads, the cost per page view would likely be very small. Perhaps $0.01-$0.10. And there could be a mechanism for adjusting that cost based on the local cost of living of a given user. Perhaps through a parameter pushed by the subscription service, which it would obtain in some more-or-less anonymous fashion.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

>I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to see. This is not the revenue-maximizing ad. Expected value for the company buying the ad is proportional to the product of conversion value and likelihood to convert. "Ads that I want to see" corresponds to the latter, but is completely uncorrelated to the former. For example, advertisers would rather sell a 1% chance of generating a valuable asbestos lawsuit lead than a 100% chance of generating a $2 lunch restaurant lead.

crazygringo 7y ago

I've gotta say, I agree. I don't ever need to see car ads, because I live in NYC. Nor for medications for conditions <x, y, z> which I don't have. Nor for that Amazon product which I already bought. I am so happy to spend three minutes filling out my interests profile. In fact, I already did it for Google when someone pointed out you can. But for all the many ads served by other ad networks, no dice. :(

xfitm3 7y ago
You can also run ublock and never see ads.

Porthos9K 7y ago

If they asked me, I would tell them that there is no such thing as a relevant ad. Even if I'm shopping for a specific product, if an ad gets through my defenses I stop shopping. If I see an ad for your brand, I will avoid your brand.

mirimir 7y ago
Pretty much. Ads tell me that something exists. I don't entirely reject products whose ads I happen to see, but I do rate them inversely proportional to the scope of their claims. And it's not just obvious ads. You can't trust online customer reviews, because there's an industry devoted to spamming them, both positively and negatively. And you can't trust third-party reviews, because they're often disguised press releases. Or biased by payment. For example, I've been told that many sites that review VPN services basically auction their rating slots.
- craydandy 7y ago
  Negative reviews are also used put down competitors' products, blackmail free products or services, and in so many other ways that only humans can invent. The reviews are less reliable every passing year. Some platforms have awakened to this, so they have rules or guides what to do when customer tries to blackmail free stuff with negative reviews. However, not all.
- bluGill 7y ago
  The most useful ads are for something I didn't even know existed before seeing it. I've often bought things to improve my life that before seeing the ad I didn't know existed.
majewsky 7y ago
You'll have a hard time shopping for groceries then. Besides displays with ads on them, brands pay big money for preferential placement on shopping aisles. Same for the order of product listings on Amazon etc.
- 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

Back in the olden days, we'd run ads in programming magazines, because that was our target audience. Lots of people bought those magazines only for the ads for programming products. Heck, I buy hot rod magazines because they have ads from vendors for parts I need. With the web sites I run, I thought it would be a service to users to display ads appropriate to the content of the page. For example, if the page was about bash programming, you might see an ad for a book on bash. But there turned out to be NO WAY to specify a category of ads to run on a site. It was all their algorithm. Hence my sites on programming would keep running ads for "Batman Returns". How utterly pointless and boring. I had a page on the Revolutionary War, and the affiliate ads would be for travel agencies. What would have worked would be books on military history. I eventually gave it up. I.e. the ad should be on-topic to the specific web page, not specific to the reader. Not only would this be much better targeted, gathering profile data on the user would not be helpful.

Bombthecat 7y ago
Amazon affiliate is probably the only way. But you need to hand pick everything..
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I did resort to hand picking them for Amazon. Unfortunately, that requires constant attention. Amazon, please let your affiliates at least pick the category! Then use keywords on the web page to pick the product in the category, hopefully at random. Seeing the exact same ad over and over is counterproductive.
kinleyd 7y ago
I think your comment is spot on. Have Google et al really missed that, or have they just concluded that individual tracking is better? It seems a pity as focusing on the content being served for ad cues is so obviously how it used to work.
- beerandt 7y ago
  The holy grail of advertising has always been proving that it works. Delivering one ad that results in a confirmed purchase is much more lucrative than multiple plain page views, or even clicks. The result is twofold: 1- trying to predict who's ready to purchase something, right now. 2- trying to prove someone that's seen an ad actually made a purchase. This is why Gmail for free made sense from day one. What better way to verify a purchase that by having access to emailed receipts. This is also why Google's been buying credit card purchase histories from Visa/MasterCard/banks etc. Separately, there's predicting one of the big life events: college, wedding, baby, home purchase. If I'm remembering correctly, getting a jump over competitors on one of these can be worth hundreds of dollars. There's the story of Target using purchase behavior to try and predict pregnancy, so that they could send targeted / trackable coupons to the expectant mothers. They sent one such packet to a 16 year old girl, who's parents immediately threw a fit about how inappropriate it was, and how dare they accuse their innocent little girl of being promiscuous... Turns out not only was she pregnant, but Target knew before even the girl realized it. The kicker: this was circa 1996. All of this to say, targeted ads might make sense, but proven effectiveness pays more. For that, trackings pretty much required.

dxbydt 7y ago

>why not just ask them????? Mostly because revealed preferences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Revealed preferences are bullshit if you manipulate the environment so that people reveal the "preferences" you want them to reveal.
- anoncake 7y ago
  They're always bullshit. Even if you don't try to manipulate people all you measure is their current habits.

igornadj 7y ago

Users are notoriously bad at being able to explain what they want, or even knowing what they want. This is why UX/usability studies are the gold standard of delivering value: put a user in front of your tool, give them a task and watch the actual actions they make to complete the task. This has been the norm for decades.

skybrian 7y ago

I don't know about you, but I'm overwhelmed by requests to fill out surveys. Every time I buy anything they want me to fill out a survey or leave a review. I ignore them like spam calls. Figuring out that things went basically okay from logs is much less intrusive. Surveys should be saved for more important things.

on_and_off 7y ago

fwiw, I work for one of these services. For a large consumer app (and actually, that's less and less reserved to the larger apps only), you can expect that every time you see a widget, or tap anywhere in the app, it is going to trigger some kind of analytics log. The goal is not to determine your profile in order to sell you ads but to understand how people use our product (in aggregate). Let's say you have a checkout feature. you need to add an address, payment method and tap checkout. If a significant % of your users bail out of the checkout flow in the address step, there might be something you want to investigate. We also do user studies, they are super useful but are harder to generalize.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

scoutt 7y ago

>> I'm still waiting for the option to see the ads that I want to see. It's not about what you like, it's about what you need or think you need. Probably is because your interests change over time. And because they want to profit on what you need today. You might like cars, but you don't buy cars every day, just as me that I don't purchase guitars every week. I think they want to profit from your immediate need, and that requires spying on you, your messages, your browsing history, etc.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Probably is because your interests change over time. They do, and the sites I visit change with them too. Visiting a site about something is as clear and unambiguous signal about my interests as you could possibly get. The reason it's totally disregarded is, I believe, because it's simpler and more profitable to run ad networks as a market. Neither the publisher nor the ad network really care what ads are being run, they care about maximizing profits. And some advertisers (e.g. universally appealing product categories like clothes and movies) can easily outspend niche sellers. As it is today, advertising is an act of malice, so don't expect anyone to care about the user end of the equation. You can get a better ROI by showing more user-aligned ads, but you can also get a better ROI by doubling down on the surveillance capitalism, and the latter requires less coordination.

ThomPete 7y ago

You dont ask users about their intent, you monitor how they behave. Thats how google makes their money.

JadeNB 7y ago

> All this effort to distill user behavior and user intent from logs... why not just ask them????? Because users lie, intentionally and unintentionally?