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Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fas

Im enjoying Hulu/Netflix/Prime Video while I can. My kid has grown up in a household without commercials and where you get points for who can hit “skip” the fastest when one does pop up. Commercials were always annoying but when you aren’t used to seeing them then it really hits home that your seeing the exact same commercial for floor wax sixteen times an hour and the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. You can forgive broadcast TV - someone had money to spend and wanted to hawk floor wax to the ethos excessively. But lets look at YouTube for example - their algorithms are supposed to be so sophisticated but I’m outside every desirable demographic except maybe not dead, I don’t impulse buy, I don’t have any wax able floors, if I did I would switch apartments before waxing them, and I downvote, skip, or just kill the youtube app every time I see a commercial. I should be number one in the lost cause file, but instead they keep showing me the same stuff that I’ve already downloaded, skipped, stopped transferring countless times. How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion?

anpat 7y ago
Probably because it still earns them money over not showing you anything! I have come to believe that over a period of time producers and consumers both will realise that the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them. Less cynical thoughts; 1. I don’t know if and what kind of controls/flexibility YouTube allows on demand side, but it could be a “foot meet gun” story. ie advertiser is new to platform and messed up targeting and/or is over-bidding. 2. Advertiser might think 1 cent CPM is worth it, no one else bothers to bid on your data (based on your description) - still kinda ties into cynical view.
- war1025 7y ago
  > the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them. Rational self interest, as they say.
jwr 7y ago
They get paid for displaying the ads to you, so that's what they do :-) It's really that simple. And they will continue to do that while advertisers get a return on their ads (it isn't clear if they do, sometimes it can take a while for the market to realize that a certain fad strategy simply does not work). But I'm guessing it does work.
dataduck 7y ago
Maybe Google's algorithms have determined that the floor wax company doesn't look at / understand its analytics reports.
- zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  Haha, I think you’ve nailed it
- deathhand 7y ago
  I wish it was that intelligent. Ad buyers are morons and companies like Criteo are snake oil salesmen. Advertising, as a whole, is one of the most inefficient use of man-power capitalism has ever created. Intelligent people who have been failed for the US education system(chasing the goal of 'be whatever you want to be... but there is no sustainable way) usually end up there in some fashion. This glut of capable but ineffectual intellectuals is either helping the ponzi fiat money scheme or if this virus is a 12 month affair with limited buying leads to mass civil unrest. The demographics of the ad companies skew left... which is ok as long as we don't get into South American Currency Territory which i think the petro dollar should keep away for the time being.
  - SanchoPanda 7y ago
    The greatest minds of our generation optimizing for the marginal click instead of studying science, what could go wrong?
jstanley 7y ago
FWIW, uBlock Origin is very effective against Youtube. I never see ads on Youtube.
- culturestate 7y ago
  Do you mean display ads or pre-rolls? I don't get any display ads but I get pre-rolls constantly with uBO.
  - lain_ 7y ago
    I'm using AdGuard and I don't get any ads ever on youtube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adguard-adblocker/bgnkhhnnamicmpeenaelnjfhikgbkllg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adguard-adblocker/...
  - icebraining 7y ago
    I get neither with uBO. Seems that different people have different experiences, either due to outdated uBO filters or differences in YT behavior.
  - InvaderFizz 7y ago
    I don't get any ads whatsoever on YouTube with uBO. What I do get is about a 20% chance of something screwing up in the ad blocking process for prerolls and getting the grey "there was an error" screen instead of a video. I just hit reload and the video starts playing. Slightly annoying, but I don't utilize auto play, so I don't have to worry about it stopping my playlist or passive watching.
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  Same for me, when i use youtube on my mobile i am flabbergasted by the amount of ads and 20 minute promo programs. Why and how can you watch that without a add blocker?
  - jwilliamson 7y ago
    Just FYI, uBO blocks YouTube ads if you are using Firebox on mobile.
nolok 7y ago
> the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you will get is the one your insurance covers? I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice. I understand ads for non prescription drugs and little things like cough, but ads for HIV treatment I can't fathom. As for your question, while the ad might be massively bad targeting for you, it might still be the best they have where you fit in the restriction set by the ad publisher, so better they get money on a poor match than no money at all. Usually a publisher that has terrible targeting.
- vinay427 7y ago
  I'll take a stab at the simpler questions here: > do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? No, but I imagine patients liable to the advertising might mention a specific medication in a conversation with their doctor. Whether that has any effect depends on the advertisement/patient/doctor. > Does your opinion override that of the doctor? For prescription drugs, no.
- drevil-v2 7y ago
  Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs. And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan then why not switch to a different doctor?
  - umvi 7y ago
    Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect. > Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack of knowledge/experience, etc. Doctors are not exempt from this same phenomenon, in fact it may be amplified because there's just so much more knowledge you need to index and access compared to programming. Just as you don't know about every web framework in existence, doctors don't know about every medicine in existence. "Ask your web designer to see if using Svelte is right for you."
Cass 7y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually quite a good pick for the floor wax commercial demographic. Now you, specifically, may not have waxable floors or an interest in floor maintenance, but the more interesting questions is, how many people who look similar to you to an algorithm do? Let's assume renters don't generally wax their floors, and cheap shitty floors don't need waxing. So we're looking for people likely to own a home nice enough too have wooden floors worth maintaining. You could probably do worse than to show that commercial to "highly-educated people with children, working in fields adjacent to software engineering."
rriepe 7y ago
Advertising isn't sales. Advertising is presence. If you're cognizant of an ad at all, then it worked, whether you buy the product or not.
xbmcuser 7y ago
You can pay the $10~ per month for premium and get rid of the ads. Many people here on hn complain about the ads but are unwilling to pay to support non ad version at the same time.
- mattmanser 7y ago
  They're starting to creep into premium now too. I have Google play music which includes YouTube premium, just checked YouTube on my phone and it immediately showed an advert, even though I'm signed in.
  - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
    Are you sure your subscription includes YT Premium? This isn't a given.
- close04 7y ago
  I'm a Premium user but between permanently enabled uBlock, Pi-Hole, and (almost) always-on VPN to use all that I never payed attention to the ads aspect. The most obvious benefits for me were that I can download the music and listen offline, including with the screen off which means I can connect now my Sonos system to Youtube.
- wmeredith 7y ago
  I pay for the premium version and there are still some ads.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I was going to sign up for premium, I don't think I'll bother if it does work.
    - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
      Well, serving high-definition video isn't free. If you watch a lot of YouTube, have an adblocker, and don't pay for Premium, that would make you a freeloader.
ses1984 7y ago
You are on hacker news so it's likely you are a successful young adult male, what do you mean hn readers aren't in a desirable demographic? (apologies if that doesn't exactly describe you) Google might know you are a lost cause but they don't actually care, they still sold the impression. Anyway you might have Google targeting turned off, which is why you're seeing ads for floor wax instead of whatever saas is advertising on YouTube that day you happened to read a blog post about.
- Kye 7y ago
  Ads can't seem to decide if I'm a rich homemaking woman with a side business, a rich man high up in a company, or someone who speaks Spanish and loves fast food. I don't know how to tell them I'm none of those.
tartoran 7y ago
In a similar way I am a deadbeat for advertisers, they have never convinced me to by any product ever. Even worse, an irritating advertising made me expressly avoid advertised products because as a consumer I dont want to pay for the advertising through the added price to the product itself. I stopped watching TV a long time ago and feel way more peaceful. While browsing online I am using adblockers anyway and wonder how long until I cannot access content this way. If it stops working I will stop using and theres no turning back to advertising to me, it doesnt work and irritates me. I would like to see a micropayments system for online content but with the option to plus/minus up the microdonnation based on whether i found the content useful, whether it was clickbait, etc. It would be great to be able to pay more for a movie that i liked and less on a movie i couldnt stand and didn’t finish watching.
bsimpson 7y ago
If there were such a thing as a "this person isn't worth showing ads to" profile, people would game the system to try to earn those tags. Even if you never made ad-influenced decisions, it's probably still worth showing you ads to normalize them for people who do.
pandaman 7y ago
I would be very worried if I started to see relevant advertisement (online or I also have the cheapest Hulu with commercials) : that would mean that somebody collects correct information about me and can sensibly interpret it. Luckily all the advertisement I see is barely relevant - at most I get banners for the sites I've recently visited.
- pgt 7y ago
  Anything smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to fail it. There's a story from a few years ago about how Target knew customers knew themselves, but they were smart enough to mix the diaper discounts in with some lawnmower specials so it would not arouse suspicions. I would not be surprised if the algorithms know more than they seem.
  - pandaman 7y ago
    Are you talking about "Target knew a girl was pregnant before she knew herself!" story? It does not seem very credible tbqh and even if the particular event described in the NYT article actually had happened, a random advertisement reaching somebody from the intended audience is bound to happen from time to time.
lrem 7y ago
Have you enabled some kind of privacy feature? There are some checkboxes in the Google account settings that make ads appreciably dumber.
cosmie 7y ago
> How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion? Google provides a platform for advertisers to use. The sophistication of that usage, however, is up to the marketers actually using it. At a small scale, it's relatively easy to bootstrap the type of integrated infrastructure and execution required for sophisticated campaigns. But at scale, marketing programs require so much people-coordination (between various internal departments and external agencies) that relatively few firms end up in an operationally mature state to attempt to integrate sophisticated technical and data operations as well. Anecdotally speaking, the morass of font licensing[1] is likely to have an order of magnitude more attention in a typical campaign than something as seemingly critical as the actual ad targeting or frequency caps. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370372
derangedHorse 7y ago
They should be showing you ads for YouTube Red if their algorithm was really sophisticated lol

anpat 7y ago

Probably because it still earns them money over not showing you anything! I have come to believe that over a period of time producers and consumers both will realise that the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them. Less cynical thoughts; 1. I don’t know if and what kind of controls/flexibility YouTube allows on demand side, but it could be a “foot meet gun” story. ie advertiser is new to platform and messed up targeting and/or is over-bidding. 2. Advertiser might think 1 cent CPM is worth it, no one else bothers to bid on your data (based on your description) - still kinda ties into cynical view.

war1025 7y ago
> the middleman cares more about it’s own cut over either of them. Rational self interest, as they say.

jwr 7y ago

They get paid for displaying the ads to you, so that's what they do :-) It's really that simple. And they will continue to do that while advertisers get a return on their ads (it isn't clear if they do, sometimes it can take a while for the market to realize that a certain fad strategy simply does not work). But I'm guessing it does work.

dataduck 7y ago

Maybe Google's algorithms have determined that the floor wax company doesn't look at / understand its analytics reports.

zxcvbn4038 7y ago
Haha, I think you’ve nailed it
deathhand 7y ago
I wish it was that intelligent. Ad buyers are morons and companies like Criteo are snake oil salesmen. Advertising, as a whole, is one of the most inefficient use of man-power capitalism has ever created. Intelligent people who have been failed for the US education system(chasing the goal of 'be whatever you want to be... but there is no sustainable way) usually end up there in some fashion. This glut of capable but ineffectual intellectuals is either helping the ponzi fiat money scheme or if this virus is a 12 month affair with limited buying leads to mass civil unrest. The demographics of the ad companies skew left... which is ok as long as we don't get into South American Currency Territory which i think the petro dollar should keep away for the time being.
- SanchoPanda 7y ago
  The greatest minds of our generation optimizing for the marginal click instead of studying science, what could go wrong?

jstanley 7y ago

FWIW, uBlock Origin is very effective against Youtube. I never see ads on Youtube.

culturestate 7y ago
Do you mean display ads or pre-rolls? I don't get any display ads but I get pre-rolls constantly with uBO.
- lain_ 7y ago
  I'm using AdGuard and I don't get any ads ever on youtube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adguard-adblocker/bgnkhhnnamicmpeenaelnjfhikgbkllg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/adguard-adblocker/...
- icebraining 7y ago
  I get neither with uBO. Seems that different people have different experiences, either due to outdated uBO filters or differences in YT behavior.
- InvaderFizz 7y ago
  I don't get any ads whatsoever on YouTube with uBO. What I do get is about a 20% chance of something screwing up in the ad blocking process for prerolls and getting the grey "there was an error" screen instead of a video. I just hit reload and the video starts playing. Slightly annoying, but I don't utilize auto play, so I don't have to worry about it stopping my playlist or passive watching.
GrumpyNl 7y ago
Same for me, when i use youtube on my mobile i am flabbergasted by the amount of ads and 20 minute promo programs. Why and how can you watch that without a add blocker?
- jwilliamson 7y ago
  Just FYI, uBO blocks YouTube ads if you are using Firebox on mobile.

nolok 7y ago

> the exact same commercial for anti-AIDS drugs sixteen times per hour. European here, I will go over my surprise / weirdness about having ads for chronic disease medication like that, to ask : do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? Does your opinion override that of the doctor? Is it not ultimately a moot choice both by you and the doctor because the one you will get is the one your insurance covers? I have a hard time reconciling what (little) I know about in the US medical system between insurance behavior, doctor choice, and ads aimed at patient choice. I understand ads for non prescription drugs and little things like cough, but ads for HIV treatment I can't fathom. As for your question, while the ad might be massively bad targeting for you, it might still be the best they have where you fit in the restriction set by the ad publisher, so better they get money on a poor match than no money at all. Usually a publisher that has terrible targeting.

vinay427 7y ago
I'll take a stab at the simpler questions here: > do you actually, you as the patient, choose which medication you receive for disease like that? No, but I imagine patients liable to the advertising might mention a specific medication in a conversation with their doctor. Whether that has any effect depends on the advertisement/patient/doctor. > Does your opinion override that of the doctor? For prescription drugs, no.
drevil-v2 7y ago
Every time I am visiting USA, I am flabbergasted at the medication ads on TV. Not just for off-the-counter stuff like paracetamol or anti-inflammation medication but actual freaking prescription only drugs. And they actually ask you to speak to your doctor about the drug. Haha what? Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? And if I don't trust his/her treatment plan then why not switch to a different doctor?
- umvi 7y ago
  Playing devil's advocate... doctors are neither omniscient nor perfect. > Shouldn't my doctor morally and by default be suggesting the best treatment for what I have? Shouldn't programmers by default be suggesting the best algorithm/programming language/design patterns for the problem at hand? In a perfect world, yes. But we live in an imperfect world where sub-optimal choices are made due to time constraints, lack of knowledge/experience, etc. Doctors are not exempt from this same phenomenon, in fact it may be amplified because there's just so much more knowledge you need to index and access compared to programming. Just as you don't know about every web framework in existence, doctors don't know about every medicine in existence. "Ask your web designer to see if using Svelte is right for you."

Cass 7y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if you're actually quite a good pick for the floor wax commercial demographic. Now you, specifically, may not have waxable floors or an interest in floor maintenance, but the more interesting questions is, how many people who look similar to you to an algorithm do? Let's assume renters don't generally wax their floors, and cheap shitty floors don't need waxing. So we're looking for people likely to own a home nice enough too have wooden floors worth maintaining. You could probably do worse than to show that commercial to "highly-educated people with children, working in fields adjacent to software engineering."

rriepe 7y ago

Advertising isn't sales. Advertising is presence. If you're cognizant of an ad at all, then it worked, whether you buy the product or not.

xbmcuser 7y ago

You can pay the $10~ per month for premium and get rid of the ads. Many people here on hn complain about the ads but are unwilling to pay to support non ad version at the same time.

mattmanser 7y ago
They're starting to creep into premium now too. I have Google play music which includes YouTube premium, just checked YouTube on my phone and it immediately showed an advert, even though I'm signed in.
- Tijdreiziger 7y ago
  Are you sure your subscription includes YT Premium? This isn't a given.
close04 7y ago
I'm a Premium user but between permanently enabled uBlock, Pi-Hole, and (almost) always-on VPN to use all that I never payed attention to the ads aspect. The most obvious benefits for me were that I can download the music and listen offline, including with the screen off which means I can connect now my Sonos system to Youtube.
wmeredith 7y ago
I pay for the premium version and there are still some ads.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I was going to sign up for premium, I don't think I'll bother if it does work.
  - Tijdreiziger 7y ago
    Well, serving high-definition video isn't free. If you watch a lot of YouTube, have an adblocker, and don't pay for Premium, that would make you a freeloader.

ses1984 7y ago

You are on hacker news so it's likely you are a successful young adult male, what do you mean hn readers aren't in a desirable demographic? (apologies if that doesn't exactly describe you) Google might know you are a lost cause but they don't actually care, they still sold the impression. Anyway you might have Google targeting turned off, which is why you're seeing ads for floor wax instead of whatever saas is advertising on YouTube that day you happened to read a blog post about.

Kye 7y ago
Ads can't seem to decide if I'm a rich homemaking woman with a side business, a rich man high up in a company, or someone who speaks Spanish and loves fast food. I don't know how to tell them I'm none of those.

tartoran 7y ago

In a similar way I am a deadbeat for advertisers, they have never convinced me to by any product ever. Even worse, an irritating advertising made me expressly avoid advertised products because as a consumer I dont want to pay for the advertising through the added price to the product itself. I stopped watching TV a long time ago and feel way more peaceful. While browsing online I am using adblockers anyway and wonder how long until I cannot access content this way. If it stops working I will stop using and theres no turning back to advertising to me, it doesnt work and irritates me. I would like to see a micropayments system for online content but with the option to plus/minus up the microdonnation based on whether i found the content useful, whether it was clickbait, etc. It would be great to be able to pay more for a movie that i liked and less on a movie i couldnt stand and didn’t finish watching.

bsimpson 7y ago

If there were such a thing as a "this person isn't worth showing ads to" profile, people would game the system to try to earn those tags. Even if you never made ad-influenced decisions, it's probably still worth showing you ads to normalize them for people who do.

pandaman 7y ago

I would be very worried if I started to see relevant advertisement (online or I also have the cheapest Hulu with commercials) : that would mean that somebody collects correct information about me and can sensibly interpret it. Luckily all the advertisement I see is barely relevant - at most I get banners for the sites I've recently visited.

pgt 7y ago
Anything smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to fail it. There's a story from a few years ago about how Target knew customers knew themselves, but they were smart enough to mix the diaper discounts in with some lawnmower specials so it would not arouse suspicions. I would not be surprised if the algorithms know more than they seem.
- pandaman 7y ago
  Are you talking about "Target knew a girl was pregnant before she knew herself!" story? It does not seem very credible tbqh and even if the particular event described in the NYT article actually had happened, a random advertisement reaching somebody from the intended audience is bound to happen from time to time.

lrem 7y ago

Have you enabled some kind of privacy feature? There are some checkboxes in the Google account settings that make ads appreciably dumber.

cosmie 7y ago

> How do you explain that in the era of machine learning and no holds barred privacy invasion? Google provides a platform for advertisers to use. The sophistication of that usage, however, is up to the marketers actually using it. At a small scale, it's relatively easy to bootstrap the type of integrated infrastructure and execution required for sophisticated campaigns. But at scale, marketing programs require so much people-coordination (between various internal departments and external agencies) that relatively few firms end up in an operationally mature state to attempt to integrate sophisticated technical and data operations as well. Anecdotally speaking, the morass of font licensing[1] is likely to have an order of magnitude more attention in a typical campaign than something as seemingly critical as the actual ad targeting or frequency caps. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370372

derangedHorse 7y ago

They should be showing you ads for YouTube Red if their algorithm was really sophisticated lol