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As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to rand

As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information. It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right – you have to make significant investments into product, technical integrations and data buys. Given the fact that the cookies to which you are tying these investments can vanish at any time (and a large % do so regularly), it rarely makes business sense to make the right sort of investments. Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip. I actually remember seeing a deck from a data company boasting how their gender data was ~ 60% accurate. Why are we worried about this? Contextual targeting is far more effective. As an example, targeting an ad on Elle.com is more than 60% likely to reach women than an ad targeted based on cookie data. Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. I'm wondering whether this is due to a generally poor understanding of cookie targeting effectiveness or if I'm missing something.

AznHisoka 7y ago
What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do cookie targeting?
- briandear 7y ago
  If those women gave you permission to contact them, that’s how. If someone bought Chanel, you don’t have a right to that information unless they explicitly gave you that right.
  - mertd 7y ago
    What about the retailer that sold the perfume? They'll usually auto sign up the customer to their product emails and/or adapt their landing page to customer's interests (like Amazon).
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > They'll usually auto sign up the customer to their product emails Fortunately, at least in the EU that's illegal.
      - tpxl 7y ago
        Under GDPR this kind of self advertising falls under legitimate use of an email address, so if you inform the user you'll send them the emails, it's legal to do so without explicit opt-in. (AFAIK IANAL)
- sincerely 7y ago
  What if I'm a women who recently bought Chanel perfume and I want you to fuck off?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dev_tty01 7y ago
  Is this a serious question? Just because you want to target something doesn't mean it is ok to do it. Geez, the arrogance. You want to do X, so the rest of us have to give up our privacy? Technical feasibility is not the same thing as ethical, courteous, or just plain being respectful of other people. The whole industry seems to have done some sort of massive mob rationalization of inappropriate behavior. It's not ok. If I am on a tech site reading about disk drive failure rates, feed me an ad about an SSD sale. If I am reading about mountain climbing, show me ads about climbing equipment. Fine. But don't start following me around the web with adds about ascenders for the rest of the afternoon. Or travel insurance. Or ... It is none of your business what I browsed half an hour earlier. Thank goodness at least one business (Apple) has enough customer focus left to try to address some of this nonsense. All the better that it helps them against some of their competitors. That just makes them more motivated. Bully for that. At least we are still the customers rather than the products with Apple.
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    Couldn't agree more. I hate it when people respond to concerns with "I make money that way, how could I possibly go on otherwise" as if it somehow legitimitized their unscrupulous activity. Their profits are nobody's problem but theirs and there is absolutely nothing wrong with putting them out of business if that's what it takes to stop their abusive surveillance capitalism. If people's use of privacy-focused software and products reduces their revenue, so be it.
    - AznHisoka 7y ago
      You got too emotional when reading my response. I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.
      - ubermonkey 7y ago
        >You got too emotional when reading my response. I read a dispassionate rebuttal of your point. Calling the reply "too emotional" is not an okay tactic.
- gwd 7y ago
  Let's translate this to brick-and-mortar: > What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do video surveillance and face-recognition targeting? Suppose a woman walked into a dress shop, and the clerk said, "We find that our $LINE line of dresses over there works really well with the Chanel perfume you just bought." Do I have to explain why 1) people think it's creepy, and 2) why people think you don't have a right to do that?
- guareber 7y ago
  Get them to sign up to your mailing list and send them an email ad. Anything else should be off limits.
choppaface 7y ago
It used to be that Flash-based cookies were pretty solid, but now there’s no more flash... What matters to ad campaigns is lift and not accuracy. What about conversion attribution? Don’t you need cookies for Amazon/etc to figure out what website led you to a purchase? What the article lacks is a breakdown of who the ad buyers are. In particular, there’s probably a big difference between today’s Facebook vs display ad buyers (especially vs 5 years ago).
- dorgo 7y ago
  > It used to be that Flash-based cookies were pretty solid, but now there’s no more flash... But there is so much more available today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie
ramphastidae 7y ago
> Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. My browser history is none of your business. That’s it. I don’t take care if violating my privacy by stealing my browser history is less effective than the newest way of violating my privacy. Doesn’t make it any better.
- _eht 7y ago
  >My browser history is none of your business. That’s it. Your browser was made to handle cookie data. It is publicly known. If it bothers you, you can turn it off. I do not see what all this sort of huffing is about.
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    And your email box is built to handle email. Doesn't mean you want hundreds of emails selling you crap everyday
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    And cookies were meant to be used to provide value to the visitor, not to extract value from the visitor (especially without their consent).
  - onion2k 7y ago
    If you walk in to Walmart you don't automatically think you're sharing your shopping habits with thousands of other companies who pay for that data[1]. People believe the web works the same way - when they visit someDomain.com they, entirely reasonably, accept they're sharing their data with someDomain but don't realise they're also sharing their data with whichever tracking/surveillance services someDomain has installed. You're right that this is just how browsers and websites and the internet as a whole works, but what tech workers and tech companies are just recently discovering is that people don't actually like or trust how it works and aren't always willing to accept it. In Apple's case they can leverage that distrust to market their products. [1] Today facial recognition and phone tracking means that you are 'sharing' that data with tracking companies, obviously.
zwaps 7y ago
You probably would be well advised to read up on the economics of consumer differentiation and price discrimination. All of today's ad-tech is set up and developed for that purpose. Whether overtly or covertly, it is the singular purpose, because the case is so clear cut: We are distributing the share of the pie between companies and consumers. It is therefore clear why people aware of basic economics consider agressive tracking and privacy violations hostile, because they ultimately are or will be. I am not worried about actually showing ads that are personalized in some way. But as others have pointed out, cookies are not for that. You can target based on the site's content and you are probably showing me a much more relevant ad anyway. I am worried that every offsite ressource and every ad is used to track me across hundreds or thousands of shady services that operate under zero regulation or control, the combination of which allows market actors to determine how much of my consumer surplus they can extract in every sense, and thus actively devaluing the internet for me, in excess of what happens in the real world! And the responses of the ad industry lobby groups pretty much prove to me what they think about choice and what they expect to get from consumers. At this stage, it is entirely rational and ethical to consider the entire ad industry as hostile. As a group, with all side-effects, the notion of just "showing an interesting ad" simply does not exist anymore. At least for the collective industry. Any effort you took to track users, no matter how noble, will ultimately be hostile to me in the future.
- dorgo 7y ago
  Why is price discrimination bad? It is about charging the highest price the customer is still ok with. Sure, if a merchant knows how badly you want his product he can increase the price. But, on the other hand, he will decrease the price for somebody who wouldn't pay the high price. It's like bargaining on a fair. A method to determine a price suitable for both sides - instead of charging every customer the same price. And it's not (only) about how much money the customer has. A rich customer can still be price sensitive and would get a low price based on price discrimination. Also, in my opinion, ads and tracking are (mostly) orthogonal concepts. A website can track or show ads or both or do nothing. Tracking is often used for ads but not exclusively so.
  - labawi 7y ago
1propionyl 7y ago
Consider this: the vast majority of people you targeted more than likely didn't understand the terms of the deal (buried in ToS, hidden behind flowery language like "personalization", didn't understand the scope of such cookies, etc). That is not informed consent. What you were doing was exploiting people by going beyond the scope of their knowledge of the world and rationalizing it by working backwards from "well, they must understand what's going on" to "they must like it or get something out of it." Problem is that's not true. The reality is, even today barely any of them likely have the faintest clue what you did to them. If they knew they would likely be far less than thrilled. ~ another ex-adtech worker
zaphirplane 7y ago
Good point, for me it’s linking my cyberspace identity to my physical identity and having that sold on, stolen aggregated. Increasing my security vulnerability to phishing and identity theft
- dorgo 7y ago
  So you would agree if I store a cookie with a (randomly generated) ID in your browser to remember what you liked, what you bought, how you interacted with my website etc.? Also, I can sell this data to third parties and show personalized ads - all without knowing who you are outside of the web..
oliwarner 7y ago
> It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right Tell that to the likes of Amazon and Ebay. Their cookie-based advertising is extremely effective. They not only get to advertise things at you that they already know you like, they also learn about other things you like by knowing what websites and content you're viewing. Why are we worried about this? Because megacorps learning everything about us isn't desirable. It only serves to intensify the advantage they have over individual sellers, and in doing so, lessening competition over many layers of business (all the way from manufacture to delivery). I'll agree these things apply much less at smaller scale, but that's also why this is so important. Handing the biggest marketing advantage to the biggest players isn't good for anybody but them.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  > they also learn about other things you like if they do that it's very, very subtle. I get mostly product that I bought, with a handful of product that I saw recently, and zero original suggestions, even if I'm open to impulse buy, I am driven by new impulses, showing me something I haven't bought once is not going to tip me over as that decision was already rationalized.
  - oliwarner 7y ago
    You're thinking too linearly. In the adverts they show you what is most likely to convert today. Stuff you've been looking at recently. But every adview is another blob of data to profile you with for future recommendations. We talk about Facebook knowing too much about us but they really only have a social handle on us. Amazon knows where we live, what we buy, how much money we have, when we're going on holiday, when we're pregnant, how many children we have, what pets we have, what cars we drive, what we like to watch, what we like to listen to, when we're home. Every new B2C service they launch is another intrusion. Advertising is just one ring in a long chain. It gives them reach over everything you view online.
- faizanbhat 7y ago
  Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, etc. have persistent cookies. They are mapped to your profile in their database. If you delete the cookie, it reappears the next time you sign in. These companies can collect vast amounts of data on you, which allows their targeting to become highly effective over time. But these companies are few and far between. Most ad tech companies have nowhere near this quality of data or access to users.
dbuder 7y ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I don't want to be glib but I don't want to write paragraphs and your first line is indistinguishable from flamebait. The Elle example is relevant to a tiny sliver of the internet and how much money people make from ads isn't relevant to whether the practice should be condone/accepted. That it is not very effective is an argument against it, as we suffer for little gain, but since it is an externality to decision maker it is the defacto choice.
belorn 7y ago
Cookie based targeting is relative easy to remove. It is an early and easy vulnerability that can be quickly addressed before the big ones that takes more engineering and fundamental changes. Contextual targeting is a bigg problem, and the fix will require a fundamental change. It is almost impossible to use technology to prevent contextual targeting in areas like email service and social media as long as the data is in clear text and available to the server. The current best bet is to use laws like GDPR but it is slow and not something a browser can dictate with a software update.
guareber 7y ago
Another 5 year adtech worker here (and I'm still in it): it doesn't matter that it's a handful of large companies that have PII, it's that those companies keep getting more and more of adbudgets, and continue to build more and more products towards continuing to build real profiles. Third party cookies should've never existed.
tempguy9999 7y ago
Let's rephrase that > I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting ...because he... > worked in ad tech for half a decade, To continue > It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either Then why's it being done? Because it doesn't work, or because it does? > Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip Uh huh. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising "In 2016, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and broadcast television. In 2017, Internet advertising revenues in the United States totaled $83.0 billion, a 14% increase over the $72.50 billion in revenues in 2016" That's the bare minimum. Right.
- buboard 7y ago
  > That's the bare minimum. Right. That's not addressing the argument. Advertising follows eyeballs, so naturally it went online. There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased however, despite all the claims about high ad tech.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    > There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased however If you're right, those who commission ads are idiots because they aren't doing the most basic cost/benefit analysis. And this in an area where doing so is very easy (don't run the ad then do run the ad, then see the immediate and longer-term difference). Also, from the same wiki link I gave "The EU limitations restrict targeting by online advertisers; researchers have estimated online advertising effectiveness decreases on average by around 65% in Europe relative to the rest of the world." Further, by "There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased" are you saying no studies have been done, or studies have been done but show no such evidence? In the latter case please post a few links, thanks.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > those who commission ads are idiots because they aren't doing the most basic cost/benefit analysis i should clarify i meant the effectiveness of ads overall, not just targetting. there is no doubt that online ads work, and that tracking ads perform better than display ads. However despite the shift to online ads, advertising spending overall is similar and it doesnt seem to have increased consumption. So i dont understand if the rise in online ad spending means anything (imho it's purely because online audience is bigger now).
buboard 7y ago
> a generally poor understanding Probably this. Adtech (ironically) do not advertise what they do. Most people read and think that e.g. google literally sells personal files on themselves.

AznHisoka 7y ago

What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do cookie targeting?

briandear 7y ago
If those women gave you permission to contact them, that’s how. If someone bought Chanel, you don’t have a right to that information unless they explicitly gave you that right.
- mertd 7y ago
  What about the retailer that sold the perfume? They'll usually auto sign up the customer to their product emails and/or adapt their landing page to customer's interests (like Amazon).
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > They'll usually auto sign up the customer to their product emails Fortunately, at least in the EU that's illegal.
    - tpxl 7y ago
      Under GDPR this kind of self advertising falls under legitimate use of an email address, so if you inform the user you'll send them the emails, it's legal to do so without explicit opt-in. (AFAIK IANAL)
sincerely 7y ago
What if I'm a women who recently bought Chanel perfume and I want you to fuck off?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dev_tty01 7y ago
Is this a serious question? Just because you want to target something doesn't mean it is ok to do it. Geez, the arrogance. You want to do X, so the rest of us have to give up our privacy? Technical feasibility is not the same thing as ethical, courteous, or just plain being respectful of other people. The whole industry seems to have done some sort of massive mob rationalization of inappropriate behavior. It's not ok. If I am on a tech site reading about disk drive failure rates, feed me an ad about an SSD sale. If I am reading about mountain climbing, show me ads about climbing equipment. Fine. But don't start following me around the web with adds about ascenders for the rest of the afternoon. Or travel insurance. Or ... It is none of your business what I browsed half an hour earlier. Thank goodness at least one business (Apple) has enough customer focus left to try to address some of this nonsense. All the better that it helps them against some of their competitors. That just makes them more motivated. Bully for that. At least we are still the customers rather than the products with Apple.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I hate it when people respond to concerns with "I make money that way, how could I possibly go on otherwise" as if it somehow legitimitized their unscrupulous activity. Their profits are nobody's problem but theirs and there is absolutely nothing wrong with putting them out of business if that's what it takes to stop their abusive surveillance capitalism. If people's use of privacy-focused software and products reduces their revenue, so be it.
  - AznHisoka 7y ago
    You got too emotional when reading my response. I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.
    - ubermonkey 7y ago
      >You got too emotional when reading my response. I read a dispassionate rebuttal of your point. Calling the reply "too emotional" is not an okay tactic.
gwd 7y ago
Let's translate this to brick-and-mortar: > What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do video surveillance and face-recognition targeting? Suppose a woman walked into a dress shop, and the clerk said, "We find that our $LINE line of dresses over there works really well with the Chanel perfume you just bought." Do I have to explain why 1) people think it's creepy, and 2) why people think you don't have a right to do that?
guareber 7y ago
Get them to sign up to your mailing list and send them an email ad. Anything else should be off limits.

choppaface 7y ago

It used to be that Flash-based cookies were pretty solid, but now there’s no more flash... What matters to ad campaigns is lift and not accuracy. What about conversion attribution? Don’t you need cookies for Amazon/etc to figure out what website led you to a purchase? What the article lacks is a breakdown of who the ad buyers are. In particular, there’s probably a big difference between today’s Facebook vs display ad buyers (especially vs 5 years ago).

dorgo 7y ago
> It used to be that Flash-based cookies were pretty solid, but now there’s no more flash... But there is so much more available today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evercookie

ramphastidae 7y ago

> Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. My browser history is none of your business. That’s it. I don’t take care if violating my privacy by stealing my browser history is less effective than the newest way of violating my privacy. Doesn’t make it any better.

_eht 7y ago
>My browser history is none of your business. That’s it. Your browser was made to handle cookie data. It is publicly known. If it bothers you, you can turn it off. I do not see what all this sort of huffing is about.
- raverbashing 7y ago
  And your email box is built to handle email. Doesn't mean you want hundreds of emails selling you crap everyday
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  And cookies were meant to be used to provide value to the visitor, not to extract value from the visitor (especially without their consent).
- onion2k 7y ago
  If you walk in to Walmart you don't automatically think you're sharing your shopping habits with thousands of other companies who pay for that data[1]. People believe the web works the same way - when they visit someDomain.com they, entirely reasonably, accept they're sharing their data with someDomain but don't realise they're also sharing their data with whichever tracking/surveillance services someDomain has installed. You're right that this is just how browsers and websites and the internet as a whole works, but what tech workers and tech companies are just recently discovering is that people don't actually like or trust how it works and aren't always willing to accept it. In Apple's case they can leverage that distrust to market their products. [1] Today facial recognition and phone tracking means that you are 'sharing' that data with tracking companies, obviously.

zwaps 7y ago

You probably would be well advised to read up on the economics of consumer differentiation and price discrimination. All of today's ad-tech is set up and developed for that purpose. Whether overtly or covertly, it is the singular purpose, because the case is so clear cut: We are distributing the share of the pie between companies and consumers. It is therefore clear why people aware of basic economics consider agressive tracking and privacy violations hostile, because they ultimately are or will be. I am not worried about actually showing ads that are personalized in some way. But as others have pointed out, cookies are not for that. You can target based on the site's content and you are probably showing me a much more relevant ad anyway. I am worried that every offsite ressource and every ad is used to track me across hundreds or thousands of shady services that operate under zero regulation or control, the combination of which allows market actors to determine how much of my consumer surplus they can extract in every sense, and thus actively devaluing the internet for me, in excess of what happens in the real world! And the responses of the ad industry lobby groups pretty much prove to me what they think about choice and what they expect to get from consumers. At this stage, it is entirely rational and ethical to consider the entire ad industry as hostile. As a group, with all side-effects, the notion of just "showing an interesting ad" simply does not exist anymore. At least for the collective industry. Any effort you took to track users, no matter how noble, will ultimately be hostile to me in the future.

dorgo 7y ago
Why is price discrimination bad? It is about charging the highest price the customer is still ok with. Sure, if a merchant knows how badly you want his product he can increase the price. But, on the other hand, he will decrease the price for somebody who wouldn't pay the high price. It's like bargaining on a fair. A method to determine a price suitable for both sides - instead of charging every customer the same price. And it's not (only) about how much money the customer has. A rich customer can still be price sensitive and would get a low price based on price discrimination. Also, in my opinion, ads and tracking are (mostly) orthogonal concepts. A website can track or show ads or both or do nothing. Tracking is often used for ads but not exclusively so.
- labawi 7y ago

1propionyl 7y ago

Consider this: the vast majority of people you targeted more than likely didn't understand the terms of the deal (buried in ToS, hidden behind flowery language like "personalization", didn't understand the scope of such cookies, etc). That is not informed consent. What you were doing was exploiting people by going beyond the scope of their knowledge of the world and rationalizing it by working backwards from "well, they must understand what's going on" to "they must like it or get something out of it." Problem is that's not true. The reality is, even today barely any of them likely have the faintest clue what you did to them. If they knew they would likely be far less than thrilled. ~ another ex-adtech worker

zaphirplane 7y ago

Good point, for me it’s linking my cyberspace identity to my physical identity and having that sold on, stolen aggregated. Increasing my security vulnerability to phishing and identity theft

dorgo 7y ago
So you would agree if I store a cookie with a (randomly generated) ID in your browser to remember what you liked, what you bought, how you interacted with my website etc.? Also, I can sell this data to third parties and show personalized ads - all without knowing who you are outside of the web..

oliwarner 7y ago

> It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right Tell that to the likes of Amazon and Ebay. Their cookie-based advertising is extremely effective. They not only get to advertise things at you that they already know you like, they also learn about other things you like by knowing what websites and content you're viewing. Why are we worried about this? Because megacorps learning everything about us isn't desirable. It only serves to intensify the advantage they have over individual sellers, and in doing so, lessening competition over many layers of business (all the way from manufacture to delivery). I'll agree these things apply much less at smaller scale, but that's also why this is so important. Handing the biggest marketing advantage to the biggest players isn't good for anybody but them.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
> they also learn about other things you like if they do that it's very, very subtle. I get mostly product that I bought, with a handful of product that I saw recently, and zero original suggestions, even if I'm open to impulse buy, I am driven by new impulses, showing me something I haven't bought once is not going to tip me over as that decision was already rationalized.
- oliwarner 7y ago
  You're thinking too linearly. In the adverts they show you what is most likely to convert today. Stuff you've been looking at recently. But every adview is another blob of data to profile you with for future recommendations. We talk about Facebook knowing too much about us but they really only have a social handle on us. Amazon knows where we live, what we buy, how much money we have, when we're going on holiday, when we're pregnant, how many children we have, what pets we have, what cars we drive, what we like to watch, what we like to listen to, when we're home. Every new B2C service they launch is another intrusion. Advertising is just one ring in a long chain. It gives them reach over everything you view online.
faizanbhat 7y ago
Amazon, Ebay, Walmart, etc. have persistent cookies. They are mapped to your profile in their database. If you delete the cookie, it reappears the next time you sign in. These companies can collect vast amounts of data on you, which allows their targeting to become highly effective over time. But these companies are few and far between. Most ad tech companies have nowhere near this quality of data or access to users.

dbuder 7y ago

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. I don't want to be glib but I don't want to write paragraphs and your first line is indistinguishable from flamebait. The Elle example is relevant to a tiny sliver of the internet and how much money people make from ads isn't relevant to whether the practice should be condone/accepted. That it is not very effective is an argument against it, as we suffer for little gain, but since it is an externality to decision maker it is the defacto choice.

belorn 7y ago

Cookie based targeting is relative easy to remove. It is an early and easy vulnerability that can be quickly addressed before the big ones that takes more engineering and fundamental changes. Contextual targeting is a bigg problem, and the fix will require a fundamental change. It is almost impossible to use technology to prevent contextual targeting in areas like email service and social media as long as the data is in clear text and available to the server. The current best bet is to use laws like GDPR but it is slow and not something a browser can dictate with a software update.

guareber 7y ago

Another 5 year adtech worker here (and I'm still in it): it doesn't matter that it's a handful of large companies that have PII, it's that those companies keep getting more and more of adbudgets, and continue to build more and more products towards continuing to build real profiles. Third party cookies should've never existed.

tempguy9999 7y ago

Let's rephrase that > I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting ...because he... > worked in ad tech for half a decade, To continue > It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either Then why's it being done? Because it doesn't work, or because it does? > Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip Uh huh. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising "In 2016, Internet advertising revenues in the United States surpassed those of cable television and broadcast television. In 2017, Internet advertising revenues in the United States totaled $83.0 billion, a 14% increase over the $72.50 billion in revenues in 2016" That's the bare minimum. Right.

buboard 7y ago
> That's the bare minimum. Right. That's not addressing the argument. Advertising follows eyeballs, so naturally it went online. There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased however, despite all the claims about high ad tech.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased however If you're right, those who commission ads are idiots because they aren't doing the most basic cost/benefit analysis. And this in an area where doing so is very easy (don't run the ad then do run the ad, then see the immediate and longer-term difference). Also, from the same wiki link I gave "The EU limitations restrict targeting by online advertisers; researchers have estimated online advertising effectiveness decreases on average by around 65% in Europe relative to the rest of the world." Further, by "There is no evidence that its effectiveness has increased" are you saying no studies have been done, or studies have been done but show no such evidence? In the latter case please post a few links, thanks.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > those who commission ads are idiots because they aren't doing the most basic cost/benefit analysis i should clarify i meant the effectiveness of ads overall, not just targetting. there is no doubt that online ads work, and that tracking ads perform better than display ads. However despite the shift to online ads, advertising spending overall is similar and it doesnt seem to have increased consumption. So i dont understand if the rise in online ad spending means anything (imho it's purely because online audience is bigger now).

buboard 7y ago

> a generally poor understanding Probably this. Adtech (ironically) do not advertise what they do. Most people read and think that e.g. google literally sells personal files on themselves.