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Here's a really naive question. The article talks about collecting data for some audience segments. Are they talking about letting users check checkboxes for

Here's a really naive question. The article talks about collecting data for some audience segments. Are they talking about letting users check checkboxes for the segments they might be interested in, or are they going to try to do what the third-party advertising companies do, which is try to guess what segments their users fall into by hoovering up what data they can find about them? It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that that's all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations would stop.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in The most profitable ad categories are in things like insurance and legal. Who would opt in to those?
- andrewjmg 6y ago
  got a source on that claim?
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    The adsense niches which pay the most: https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/ https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/ You also see it in Google keyword prices: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-keywords-google https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-keywords-g... The most profitable keywords are in industries where there is a high lifetime customer cost. Most of those are mundane because the less you think about it, the longer you stay as a customer.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      I would have said the more ambulance chasing legal queries and plumbers 15 years ago when I did a bit of AdWords plumbing keywords in London where £45 to £50 quid
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      >> Adblocker detected! Please disable to enjoy my marketing guides. Sure...
- keenmaster 6y ago
  >Who would opt-in to those? The OP's approach doesn't depend on people opting into legal ads. You can use ML/regressions/whatever to extrapolate the best people to show which type of legal ads based on their interests, even if those interests do not include "Legal". There doesn't even need to be an opt-out option at all. I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > You can use ML/regressions/whatever But do you not feed that with all sorts of data you aggregate about the user?
    - keenmaster 6y ago
      When a user volunteers granular data about their interests, you can use pre-existing correlates between those interests and purchasing probabilities. Those correlates can be derived from exogenous data generated from a subset of users with the same interests (who voluntarily accept more tracking for free premium features), experiments, educated estimates from experts, etc... The above approach might not be perfect, but I would compare it to the recent trend towards organic food. Organic food is simply costlier and less efficient to produce. Nonetheless, a growing number of people wouldn't do without it. They only visit stores with organic meat and produce. Websites that completely eschew tracking and third party tracker data can be the "Whole Foods" of websites.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    You can infer a lot about which sort of stories people read especially for news papers - and also their geo location. Basic ML clustering - its not perfect.
  - salawat 6y ago
    >I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money. Your natural learning just failed. Congratulations. Can't wait to see the Machine learned version you want to force on people completely unawares of what you're doing. Privacy bloody means something. Until you start respecting people's desire to be left well enough alone, and not have their attention imposed on by obnoxious advertising, all you are going to door ensure that the wave of sentiment against the practice grows more and more severe.
- rch 6y ago
  If the top categories apply for most people by default, then there's no reason to have people opt-in or track them.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    The general categories apply to everyone. The profitable subcategories are very specific, especially based on location and income.
- godshatter 6y ago
  If people don't check the "legal" or "insurance" boxes, then they wouldn't be the most profitable any longer, something else would be. And it would be something people are proactively more interested in. Besides, if you're in a situation where you might need a lawyer or you might need a type of insurance, you might actually go check that box, even if you uncheck it again once you've found one.
christophilus 6y ago
I can't think of the last relevant online advertisement I've seen. They're almost always out of context and uninteresting. On the other hand, magazine ads are usually well-fitted to the topics in the magazine, and I find I often read them. The point is, I'm not really convinced that tracking is necessary in order to produce more relevant ads. I guess it's kinda necessary in order to track how many views an ad gets, but there's gotta be a better way to do that, and it doesn't need to collect any data other than "viewed++" or maybe a bit more to prevent gaming the system.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Go into the market for a mildly big ticket item other than a house and do some searches or browse some websites with privacy blockers off. You'll get start getting "relevant" ads. I went to a e-bike manufacturer's website a couple months ago and they chased me around the internet with ads for like a week.
  - Veen 6y ago
    For me, this more often presents as ubiquitous ads for something I have already bought.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Even more so on amazon "yes Amazon I have just brought that TTRPG supplement why would I want to buy it again"
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      For some ads, i think google, you can click/tap on that blue little X to close it. Then a clickable field appears, and when you click, or tap on you can choose "I already bought this" among the reasons for why you closed that ad. Question is if one is willing to do that, or not. I prefer blocking them.
  - mopsi 6y ago
    I once googled airport tow tractors to see what their specs were. Saw ads of airport equipment for months after... I'm nowhere near buying a 16-ton tug to move airliners around.
Spivak 6y ago
I honestly just kinda want an "ad shopping site" to discover new brands. Like let me post a description of an item I'm looking to purchase and then companies reach out to me with what they've got.
- kaybe 6y ago
  I want content-sensitive non-tracking ads. Like, I'm reading cooking recipes and might actually be really interested in this fancy cooking equipment or specialized book on the topic. Just don't tell me about that when I'm thinking coding and clutter up my thoughts.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    I have never heard a satisfactory explanation for why this isn't what's done. When I'm reading about lawyers I might be looking for lawyers, when I'm reading about rolling pins I probably want a rolling pin. Three weeks later I've hired a lawyer and bought a rolling pin and I don't need those ads anymore, they are perhaps the least profitable ads to show me.
    - bryan_w 6y ago
      If I open a new general store in a neighborhood, and I want to reach all the local people online without wasting money on advertising to non-locals. There isn't a cheap way to do it without using some data. People don't often research stores in an area, once they find one in an area, so you're basically left to hope that people drive by and see the store name to Google it -- but those are people who were going to your site already.
      - kaybe 6y ago
        You mean a walk-in kind of store? I feel that this lends itself more to billboard ads and mail flyers. What do you want me on your site for? Again, I don't want my thought processes hijacked, so the only acceptable context would be me searching for general stores or things that you carry, which I usually.. don't. If I'm looking at a map it is a good fit as well. On the other hand, I'd really like a searchable inventory of all city stores, even in general terms. Sometimes it's not even clear which store might carry some obscure item and I'm left to guess and check all possibilities in person, often in vain.
andreareina 6y ago
If they're avoiding all third-party data, can they do better than user-submitted preferences plus observed behavior on the domain? It seems like anything else should count as third-party.
- not2b 6y ago
  With 6 million subscribers, just looking at which articles people read gives a pretty good indication of what they are interested in. They don't need to do better.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Probably trying to combine data across all their online properties YouTube and pinterest and so on.
troydavis 6y ago
Many of the audience segments aren't interests, they're demographic and psychographic information. Per the excerpt below, would you willingly provide investable assets (ie, net worth), marital status, level of education, or family size? If not, presumably the "large team specifically to support this year of a dozen people" that NYT assembled has built a system to infer those things about you. This is NYT trying to stay competitive in light of CCPA (which state will adopt it next? my guesses are NY, OR, MA, or WA) and GDPR. First-party audience segmentation is now all but required for larger publishers. From the article: > Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
eitland 6y ago
> Did they ever think to just ask me? In Google settings I can choose my interests. Of course Google knows better than me and would always completely disregard it, showing me ads for dating sites (most seemed unusually scammy) for 10 years after I married instead of showing ads for stuff I might need or be tempted to buy anyway: - car parts (unless I have recently bought everything I need like today) - computer/tech conferences - family holidays, toys etc Since Google only hires the best and brightest and let them work freely under the most inspiring conditions this must be a really great idea. For those who don't catch it: this is soaked in sarcasm. Edits: a bunch. Let me also add that while Google ads often has great ROI[0 ] you should keep an eye on them. Google has annoyed me for ten years but I'm close to claiming they must have scammed a bunch of dating sites (or maybe just one company with a lot of fronts?) [0]: although possibly less than before according to friends who used them to bootstrap a nice company.
- a_bonobo 6y ago
  I'm still waiting for the day when advertisers realise they've been sinking millions and millions of dollars into a garbage industry. Think of all the industries tied up into advertising, and how basic ad-money is to keeping on the lights of the modern internet! Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, it's all ad-money, where will it all go if the ad-money dries up?
  - hiram112 6y ago
    There is a reason that Google, at least, is worth so much on the stock market. My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few things 'online', including email and basic searching. She wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these over the years. She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50 after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google probably made a nice percentage of this sale. Think of how many times that situation is repeated every day, all over the world. There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a printing press...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
soulofmischief 6y ago
The pervasiveness is still an issue. And if you offer that kind of information you should be paid handsomely, seeing as how much money that information may touch over your lifetime.
ravenstine 6y ago
> Did they ever think to just ask me? I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they don't do this. If they asked me what ads I'd be interested in seeing, and were to abide by my exact parameters, that would limit how many ads they can show me and hence how much money they can make. Instead, they spend billions to make guesses on what to show me, not just to show me what I want to see, but to make guesses on what I don't know that I want to see, opening up the door to showing me many more ads and make more money. That and they know that even ads for things I'm not interested in at the moment can persuade me to buy in the future. Of course, I'm not saying that any of their methods are actually very effective. Whenever I've turned uBlock Origin off, or saw ads on Hulu, I don't remember ever seeing something that's even remotely interesting to me or got me to engage. Like a lot of things such as "AI", I believe that modern advertising is a lot of overvalued bunk that mostly has value on the perception that it's necessary. It survives because people in charge don't actually understand the technicalities behind advertising, except that its use seems necessary and correlates with continued cash flow.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  If they ask you, you will tend to answer with what you perceive a better version of yourself should want. But they don't care about that imaginary version of yourself. They care about what gets you angry enough to click/share.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I've looked into this, since I think there's a massive amount of value being left on the table due to this disconnect. The standard answer is essentially what you're saying, combined with the fact that some advertisers are willing to pay more. A business that sells ad space is going to sell it as expensively as possible, so they don't want the highest bidder to know they're not on my 'approved subjects' list. A trick I think they're missing though is that I'm a lot more likely to pay for things a better version of myself should want, even more so if I've essentially asked my advertisers to nag me about it. The potential conversion rates are so much higher that I think any network which gets this right is set to blow the competition out of the water.
cat199 6y ago
> Did they ever think to just ask me? This would assume that the goal is to show you what you want to see, rather than to show you what advertisers want you to see based on what they think you need to see and might respond positively to.
wpietri 6y ago
> Did they ever think to just ask me? I think you misunderstand who the customer is here. What you want is irrelevant. It's what they can get you to pay for. If you knew what you wanted, you could just type that into a search box. Clearly, the NYT display ads have other purposes. Looking at the home page now, the ones I see are to spark feelings of need and suggest a solution at the same time. Skipping right over the part where I think about needing something and figure out the best way to solve that need.
- godshatter 6y ago
  If I'm paying for a subscription, then I am the customer, theoretically anyway. Which is why I wish they would take a subscriber-centered approach. If they sent me ads I indicated I wanted to see, then I should be more willing to click on them then some ad trying to indicate how much I really need a left-handed blivet in my life even though I've never indicated any interest in such an item. It seems like it would bring higher click-through numbers for a lot less work. Companies selling left-handed blivets might be hurt, but that's not my concern. But then I don't understand anything about the current system, admittedly. I do everything I can to avoid it. I am not actually a subscriber though, but I think I might become one for at least a while after this is in place just to try to reward companies moving in this direction. It would be refreshing to be able to go to a news site and not have noscript show dozens of domains in it's list.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Sorry, but if they're selling ads, the advertisers are the customer for that. You're the product.
munchbunny 6y ago
"Audience segments" is a pretty general term for... well, segmenting their readership so that advertisers can target specific groups. They could be doing this based on what articles you read, your geographical location, or whatever else it is, including possibly just asking you. It doesn't say much about the degree of kosher they will abide by. That said, removing 3rd party data is a big deal, because 3rd party data is consistently one of the worst offenders but also one of the simpler ways to make your advertising slots more valuable. At face value, it means: 1. They are not buying/using data gathered about you from elsewhere by other companies and other websites. 2. They are still directly analyzing data they gather about you from sites owned by NYT. 3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it.
- troydavis 6y ago
  > 3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it. NYT seems to do this with sites they own like The Wirecutter. Even privacy preferences are controlled by shared infrastructure. For example, thewirecutter.com uses https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives, which serves this JSON. Presumably the values depend on which regulations you're covered by: { "PURR_AcceptableTrackers": {"value":"controllers"}, "PURR_AcceptableTrackers_v2": {"value":"processors"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration": {"value":"full"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration_v2": {"value":"rdp"}, "PURR_CaliforniaNoticesUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingConsentUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingPreferenceUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI_v2": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_EmailMarketingOptInUI": {"value":"checked"} }
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to see how they’re implementing it. From the perspective of GDPR at least, I’m pretty sure NYT and its owned sites count as one controller/processor, and I think passes the sniff test for case #2 rather than case #3.
xmcp123 6y ago
They did. Do you remember back in the day, when you signed up for yahoo and it asked you for all the things you were "Interested In"? That's what that was. It didn't work well. It turns out most people don't answer, and the ones that do lie. Even if that weren't true interests change and you'd never update a profile like that, and the most profitable things to advertise for you'd never put on it in the first place even if you remembered. Even if that weren't true, the people that would would make the most money would be the people who got to you before you got around to updating it. As context: I'm 32 years old now. I've been advertising online since I was 15.
mancerayder 6y ago
> It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that that's all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations would stop I could be wrong here, but I think it's because marketing folks believe that they know you better than you know yourself. That certainly seems the case with salespeople, whose role is to pitch something that may not be desired right away.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  It’s simpler than that even. They don’t care what you want/need, they care what you can be convinced to buy.
- asperous 6y ago
  It's not a matter of people thinking they know better, but a matter of people seeing which approach makes them more money. Internet advertising is based on a bidding system which is highly tracked. Advertisers may be bidding too highly on "targeted" demographics, but that's outside the issues of organizations like New York Times. Its in NYT's best interest to get the highest bids possible. They may have been monitoring the difference in ad prices between highly targeted and not, and decided the difference no longer worth it.
- manigandham 6y ago
  People act differently than what they say they do. The problem is data quality and fidelity when spread across the web. When you get clean data like Facebook and Google with their first-party access, they can know you better than your own friends.
zimbatm 6y ago
Does anyone have resources on why it's best to place ads based on the user profile instead of based on the related content on the page? Personally, my interest fluctuates quite a lot and is probably closer to the current article than a median projection. When I want to buy a new thing, that interest is only valid for the time until the purchase decision. It's just an observation and probably naive. But it seems like content-based ads could be quite efficient while requiring much less privacy-invading tracking.
- asdff 6y ago
  It just seems like a lazy way to automate ad buys. If you had to consider the content on the page and match the ad content to the page, that's just more effort and thinking to be done. Advertising is dubious enough, companies aren't going to pivot like this to see a blip on the radar.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    That's how Google's billion dollar adwords business works. It's not about laziness, it's about the right environment to use it in.
- manigandham 6y ago
  It's highly dependent on the environment. Sometimes contextual relevancy is the best. Ads on search results are contextual since they can be easily aligned to what you're looking for. Other times, the content is generic or there's more info about the user (which is usually more behavioral than simple interests) and it's better to target that way. For example, you may be reading local news but you looked at new shoes yesterday, so it's better to show you ads for the shoes and try to complete that purchase than generic ads for local businesses.
asdff 6y ago
Some company trialed this (maybe it was hulu) and the results were astoundingly stupid. They had maybe 18 ads and three categories, you picked a category and got your six ads repeated infinitely.
manigandham 6y ago
Your actions show your interests more accurately than asking you. Also interests are too wide and can change over time. What's more important is what you're looking for right now and the recent actions you've taken (like reading about electric cars or looking at new shoes, even if you're interested in tech).
bmuon 6y ago
I'm surprised there's so many comments here about demographic data while that's only a really basic view into current ad tech. Since the late 2000s ad networks have invested heavily in retargeting [1]. It's quite common that people end up in a vendor, add something to the cart and never finish the transaction. Retargeting attempts to catch behaviors like that and adjust to display the items that the user showed interest in. I haven't been in that industry in years, but in the 2020s I can only expect much more nuanced systems based on ML. And everything falls apart without being able to keep a history of what you do and who you are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting
Iv 6y ago
You are not the target. Who do you think clicks on "10 hot girls want to see you NOW! click here!" or "Item you bought 6 month ago is now at a 50% sale!" I know some of the people who are the target. People who would buy 3 lifetime supplies of coffee because of a 20% sale. People who can't pass something framed as an exceptional offer. And of course, they are in debts. Fuck advertisement. It is preying on vulnerable people, it is making markets less efficient (by distorting information and urging consumers to not act rationally). Forbid this scam. Fund internet service in a saner way.
0xfffafaCrash 6y ago
This is called permission marketing and was advocated for most prominently by Seth Godin starting in the late 90’s. Unfortunately for every person in marketing who like Seth Godin cares even a little about things like privacy and consent, the marketing industry is full of thousands of people who would rather ram all kinds of ads as quickly and frequently as possible in front of every unwilling eyeball possible to try to brainwash as many impressionable people as possible into believing they need all kinds of things that they had no interest in previously. It’s a numbers game. They don’t just want to sell people things they want or need or would benefit from. They don’t even want to simply introduce people to unexpected solutions for problems they actually have. They want to do those things but they also want to exploit every psychological weakness possible to introduce new wants and new needs and new problems and insecurities into the consciousness of their targets because one can’t maximize sales without psychologically manipulating more people into thinking they want or need things they don’t. Ads are primarily exploiting impressionable insecure people with poor impulse control.
tylersmith 6y ago
What you do and buy is much more accurate information than what you say. A form of preferences will never be as effective as surveillance.
selykg 6y ago
I assume what people are interested in is one thing, but things they may _need_ is another. Being able to hoover up information that is more up to date than when you last filled out the survey means they could potentially be more accurate. i.e. You're shopping for some type of product, your search history and browser history indicates this, but is outside the realm of what you filled out in the survey. Being able to direct some ads that fit your current needs could be lucrative. I'm not an advertiser, but this is just my small bit of thought on it. Perhaps others are able to confirm or deny this is what's happening.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> trying guess what ads I might be interested in, No, they are trying to guess which add will produce the best return in terms of advertiser-sought behavioral changes if shown to you. That probably has some overlap with ads you are interested in, but it's not the same thing. > Did they ever think to just ask me? The ads that it is generally most valuable to show are the ones that the target wouldn't expect to have interest in. Advertising largely exists to create desire; if you ask people what advertising they'd like to see they will identify the advertising that would do the least to change their behavior from what it would be without the ads, which defeats the point. Untargeted ads would probably be more effective.
camycakes 6y ago
I like the idea of ad preferences built into the browser with an api that lets ad companies tap into what people actually want. It wouldn’t be invasive and it might actually generate better roi. The best person to market to after all is someone telling you “I want what you make”. This would also help the browser companies/organizations. Another note, Facebook and Google are both some of the largest companies in the world because of their advertising technology. We created them with our clicks.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in The most profitable ad categories are in things like insurance and legal. Who would opt in to those?

andrewjmg 6y ago
got a source on that claim?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The adsense niches which pay the most: https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/ https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/ You also see it in Google keyword prices: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-keywords-google https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-keywords-g... The most profitable keywords are in industries where there is a high lifetime customer cost. Most of those are mundane because the less you think about it, the longer you stay as a customer.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    I would have said the more ambulance chasing legal queries and plumbers 15 years ago when I did a bit of AdWords plumbing keywords in London where £45 to £50 quid
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    >> Adblocker detected! Please disable to enjoy my marketing guides. Sure...
keenmaster 6y ago
>Who would opt-in to those? The OP's approach doesn't depend on people opting into legal ads. You can use ML/regressions/whatever to extrapolate the best people to show which type of legal ads based on their interests, even if those interests do not include "Legal". There doesn't even need to be an opt-out option at all. I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > You can use ML/regressions/whatever But do you not feed that with all sorts of data you aggregate about the user?
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    When a user volunteers granular data about their interests, you can use pre-existing correlates between those interests and purchasing probabilities. Those correlates can be derived from exogenous data generated from a subset of users with the same interests (who voluntarily accept more tracking for free premium features), experiments, educated estimates from experts, etc... The above approach might not be perfect, but I would compare it to the recent trend towards organic food. Organic food is simply costlier and less efficient to produce. Nonetheless, a growing number of people wouldn't do without it. They only visit stores with organic meat and produce. Websites that completely eschew tracking and third party tracker data can be the "Whole Foods" of websites.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  You can infer a lot about which sort of stories people read especially for news papers - and also their geo location. Basic ML clustering - its not perfect.
- salawat 6y ago
  >I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money. Your natural learning just failed. Congratulations. Can't wait to see the Machine learned version you want to force on people completely unawares of what you're doing. Privacy bloody means something. Until you start respecting people's desire to be left well enough alone, and not have their attention imposed on by obnoxious advertising, all you are going to door ensure that the wave of sentiment against the practice grows more and more severe.
rch 6y ago
If the top categories apply for most people by default, then there's no reason to have people opt-in or track them.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  The general categories apply to everyone. The profitable subcategories are very specific, especially based on location and income.
godshatter 6y ago
If people don't check the "legal" or "insurance" boxes, then they wouldn't be the most profitable any longer, something else would be. And it would be something people are proactively more interested in. Besides, if you're in a situation where you might need a lawyer or you might need a type of insurance, you might actually go check that box, even if you uncheck it again once you've found one.

christophilus 6y ago

I can't think of the last relevant online advertisement I've seen. They're almost always out of context and uninteresting. On the other hand, magazine ads are usually well-fitted to the topics in the magazine, and I find I often read them. The point is, I'm not really convinced that tracking is necessary in order to produce more relevant ads. I guess it's kinda necessary in order to track how many views an ad gets, but there's gotta be a better way to do that, and it doesn't need to collect any data other than "viewed++" or maybe a bit more to prevent gaming the system.

topkai22 6y ago
Go into the market for a mildly big ticket item other than a house and do some searches or browse some websites with privacy blockers off. You'll get start getting "relevant" ads. I went to a e-bike manufacturer's website a couple months ago and they chased me around the internet with ads for like a week.
- Veen 6y ago
  For me, this more often presents as ubiquitous ads for something I have already bought.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Even more so on amazon "yes Amazon I have just brought that TTRPG supplement why would I want to buy it again"
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    For some ads, i think google, you can click/tap on that blue little X to close it. Then a clickable field appears, and when you click, or tap on you can choose "I already bought this" among the reasons for why you closed that ad. Question is if one is willing to do that, or not. I prefer blocking them.
- mopsi 6y ago
  I once googled airport tow tractors to see what their specs were. Saw ads of airport equipment for months after... I'm nowhere near buying a 16-ton tug to move airliners around.

Spivak 6y ago

I honestly just kinda want an "ad shopping site" to discover new brands. Like let me post a description of an item I'm looking to purchase and then companies reach out to me with what they've got.

kaybe 6y ago
I want content-sensitive non-tracking ads. Like, I'm reading cooking recipes and might actually be really interested in this fancy cooking equipment or specialized book on the topic. Just don't tell me about that when I'm thinking coding and clutter up my thoughts.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I have never heard a satisfactory explanation for why this isn't what's done. When I'm reading about lawyers I might be looking for lawyers, when I'm reading about rolling pins I probably want a rolling pin. Three weeks later I've hired a lawyer and bought a rolling pin and I don't need those ads anymore, they are perhaps the least profitable ads to show me.
  - bryan_w 6y ago
    If I open a new general store in a neighborhood, and I want to reach all the local people online without wasting money on advertising to non-locals. There isn't a cheap way to do it without using some data. People don't often research stores in an area, once they find one in an area, so you're basically left to hope that people drive by and see the store name to Google it -- but those are people who were going to your site already.
    - kaybe 6y ago
      You mean a walk-in kind of store? I feel that this lends itself more to billboard ads and mail flyers. What do you want me on your site for? Again, I don't want my thought processes hijacked, so the only acceptable context would be me searching for general stores or things that you carry, which I usually.. don't. If I'm looking at a map it is a good fit as well. On the other hand, I'd really like a searchable inventory of all city stores, even in general terms. Sometimes it's not even clear which store might carry some obscure item and I'm left to guess and check all possibilities in person, often in vain.

andreareina 6y ago

If they're avoiding all third-party data, can they do better than user-submitted preferences plus observed behavior on the domain? It seems like anything else should count as third-party.

not2b 6y ago
With 6 million subscribers, just looking at which articles people read gives a pretty good indication of what they are interested in. They don't need to do better.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Probably trying to combine data across all their online properties YouTube and pinterest and so on.

troydavis 6y ago

Many of the audience segments aren't interests, they're demographic and psychographic information. Per the excerpt below, would you willingly provide investable assets (ie, net worth), marital status, level of education, or family size? If not, presumably the "large team specifically to support this year of a dozen people" that NYT assembled has built a system to infer those things about you. This is NYT trying to stay competitive in light of CCPA (which state will adopt it next? my guesses are NY, OR, MA, or WA) and GDPR. First-party audience segmentation is now all but required for larger publishers. From the article: > Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.)

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eitland 6y ago

> Did they ever think to just ask me? In Google settings I can choose my interests. Of course Google knows better than me and would always completely disregard it, showing me ads for dating sites (most seemed unusually scammy) for 10 years after I married instead of showing ads for stuff I might need or be tempted to buy anyway: - car parts (unless I have recently bought everything I need like today) - computer/tech conferences - family holidays, toys etc Since Google only hires the best and brightest and let them work freely under the most inspiring conditions this must be a really great idea. For those who don't catch it: this is soaked in sarcasm. Edits: a bunch. Let me also add that while Google ads often has great ROI[0 ] you should keep an eye on them. Google has annoyed me for ten years but I'm close to claiming they must have scammed a bunch of dating sites (or maybe just one company with a lot of fronts?) [0]: although possibly less than before according to friends who used them to bootstrap a nice company.

a_bonobo 6y ago
I'm still waiting for the day when advertisers realise they've been sinking millions and millions of dollars into a garbage industry. Think of all the industries tied up into advertising, and how basic ad-money is to keeping on the lights of the modern internet! Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, it's all ad-money, where will it all go if the ad-money dries up?
- hiram112 6y ago
  There is a reason that Google, at least, is worth so much on the stock market. My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few things 'online', including email and basic searching. She wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these over the years. She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50 after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google probably made a nice percentage of this sale. Think of how many times that situation is repeated every day, all over the world. There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a printing press...

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soulofmischief 6y ago

The pervasiveness is still an issue. And if you offer that kind of information you should be paid handsomely, seeing as how much money that information may touch over your lifetime.

ravenstine 6y ago

> Did they ever think to just ask me? I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they don't do this. If they asked me what ads I'd be interested in seeing, and were to abide by my exact parameters, that would limit how many ads they can show me and hence how much money they can make. Instead, they spend billions to make guesses on what to show me, not just to show me what I want to see, but to make guesses on what I don't know that I want to see, opening up the door to showing me many more ads and make more money. That and they know that even ads for things I'm not interested in at the moment can persuade me to buy in the future. Of course, I'm not saying that any of their methods are actually very effective. Whenever I've turned uBlock Origin off, or saw ads on Hulu, I don't remember ever seeing something that's even remotely interesting to me or got me to engage. Like a lot of things such as "AI", I believe that modern advertising is a lot of overvalued bunk that mostly has value on the perception that it's necessary. It survives because people in charge don't actually understand the technicalities behind advertising, except that its use seems necessary and correlates with continued cash flow.

Consultant32452 6y ago
If they ask you, you will tend to answer with what you perceive a better version of yourself should want. But they don't care about that imaginary version of yourself. They care about what gets you angry enough to click/share.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I've looked into this, since I think there's a massive amount of value being left on the table due to this disconnect. The standard answer is essentially what you're saying, combined with the fact that some advertisers are willing to pay more. A business that sells ad space is going to sell it as expensively as possible, so they don't want the highest bidder to know they're not on my 'approved subjects' list. A trick I think they're missing though is that I'm a lot more likely to pay for things a better version of myself should want, even more so if I've essentially asked my advertisers to nag me about it. The potential conversion rates are so much higher that I think any network which gets this right is set to blow the competition out of the water.

cat199 6y ago

> Did they ever think to just ask me? This would assume that the goal is to show you what you want to see, rather than to show you what advertisers want you to see based on what they think you need to see and might respond positively to.

wpietri 6y ago

> Did they ever think to just ask me? I think you misunderstand who the customer is here. What you want is irrelevant. It's what they can get you to pay for. If you knew what you wanted, you could just type that into a search box. Clearly, the NYT display ads have other purposes. Looking at the home page now, the ones I see are to spark feelings of need and suggest a solution at the same time. Skipping right over the part where I think about needing something and figure out the best way to solve that need.

godshatter 6y ago
If I'm paying for a subscription, then I am the customer, theoretically anyway. Which is why I wish they would take a subscriber-centered approach. If they sent me ads I indicated I wanted to see, then I should be more willing to click on them then some ad trying to indicate how much I really need a left-handed blivet in my life even though I've never indicated any interest in such an item. It seems like it would bring higher click-through numbers for a lot less work. Companies selling left-handed blivets might be hurt, but that's not my concern. But then I don't understand anything about the current system, admittedly. I do everything I can to avoid it. I am not actually a subscriber though, but I think I might become one for at least a while after this is in place just to try to reward companies moving in this direction. It would be refreshing to be able to go to a news site and not have noscript show dozens of domains in it's list.
- wpietri 6y ago
  Sorry, but if they're selling ads, the advertisers are the customer for that. You're the product.

munchbunny 6y ago

"Audience segments" is a pretty general term for... well, segmenting their readership so that advertisers can target specific groups. They could be doing this based on what articles you read, your geographical location, or whatever else it is, including possibly just asking you. It doesn't say much about the degree of kosher they will abide by. That said, removing 3rd party data is a big deal, because 3rd party data is consistently one of the worst offenders but also one of the simpler ways to make your advertising slots more valuable. At face value, it means: 1. They are not buying/using data gathered about you from elsewhere by other companies and other websites. 2. They are still directly analyzing data they gather about you from sites owned by NYT. 3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it.

troydavis 6y ago
> 3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it. NYT seems to do this with sites they own like The Wirecutter. Even privacy preferences are controlled by shared infrastructure. For example, thewirecutter.com uses https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives, which serves this JSON. Presumably the values depend on which regulations you're covered by: { "PURR_AcceptableTrackers": {"value":"controllers"}, "PURR_AcceptableTrackers_v2": {"value":"processors"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration": {"value":"full"}, "PURR_AdConfiguration_v2": {"value":"rdp"}, "PURR_CaliforniaNoticesUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingConsentUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataProcessingPreferenceUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI_v2": {"value":"hide"}, "PURR_EmailMarketingOptInUI": {"value":"checked"} }
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing. It’s interesting to see how they’re implementing it. From the perspective of GDPR at least, I’m pretty sure NYT and its owned sites count as one controller/processor, and I think passes the sniff test for case #2 rather than case #3.

xmcp123 6y ago

They did. Do you remember back in the day, when you signed up for yahoo and it asked you for all the things you were "Interested In"? That's what that was. It didn't work well. It turns out most people don't answer, and the ones that do lie. Even if that weren't true interests change and you'd never update a profile like that, and the most profitable things to advertise for you'd never put on it in the first place even if you remembered. Even if that weren't true, the people that would would make the most money would be the people who got to you before you got around to updating it. As context: I'm 32 years old now. I've been advertising online since I was 15.

mancerayder 6y ago

> It's crazy to me that there is a multi-billion dollar industry focused on trying to guess what ads I might be interested in, using lots of privacy-invading techniques that I do my best to counter. Did they ever think to just ask me? I might not care much about ads if it was as simple as declaring the categories I might be interested in, at least if I could be convinced that that's all I would see and that the crazy privacy violations would stop I could be wrong here, but I think it's because marketing folks believe that they know you better than you know yourself. That certainly seems the case with salespeople, whose role is to pitch something that may not be desired right away.

ViViDboarder 6y ago
It’s simpler than that even. They don’t care what you want/need, they care what you can be convinced to buy.
asperous 6y ago
It's not a matter of people thinking they know better, but a matter of people seeing which approach makes them more money. Internet advertising is based on a bidding system which is highly tracked. Advertisers may be bidding too highly on "targeted" demographics, but that's outside the issues of organizations like New York Times. Its in NYT's best interest to get the highest bids possible. They may have been monitoring the difference in ad prices between highly targeted and not, and decided the difference no longer worth it.
manigandham 6y ago
People act differently than what they say they do. The problem is data quality and fidelity when spread across the web. When you get clean data like Facebook and Google with their first-party access, they can know you better than your own friends.

zimbatm 6y ago

Does anyone have resources on why it's best to place ads based on the user profile instead of based on the related content on the page? Personally, my interest fluctuates quite a lot and is probably closer to the current article than a median projection. When I want to buy a new thing, that interest is only valid for the time until the purchase decision. It's just an observation and probably naive. But it seems like content-based ads could be quite efficient while requiring much less privacy-invading tracking.

asdff 6y ago
It just seems like a lazy way to automate ad buys. If you had to consider the content on the page and match the ad content to the page, that's just more effort and thinking to be done. Advertising is dubious enough, companies aren't going to pivot like this to see a blip on the radar.
- manigandham 6y ago
  That's how Google's billion dollar adwords business works. It's not about laziness, it's about the right environment to use it in.
manigandham 6y ago
It's highly dependent on the environment. Sometimes contextual relevancy is the best. Ads on search results are contextual since they can be easily aligned to what you're looking for. Other times, the content is generic or there's more info about the user (which is usually more behavioral than simple interests) and it's better to target that way. For example, you may be reading local news but you looked at new shoes yesterday, so it's better to show you ads for the shoes and try to complete that purchase than generic ads for local businesses.

asdff 6y ago

Some company trialed this (maybe it was hulu) and the results were astoundingly stupid. They had maybe 18 ads and three categories, you picked a category and got your six ads repeated infinitely.

manigandham 6y ago

Your actions show your interests more accurately than asking you. Also interests are too wide and can change over time. What's more important is what you're looking for right now and the recent actions you've taken (like reading about electric cars or looking at new shoes, even if you're interested in tech).

bmuon 6y ago

I'm surprised there's so many comments here about demographic data while that's only a really basic view into current ad tech. Since the late 2000s ad networks have invested heavily in retargeting [1]. It's quite common that people end up in a vendor, add something to the cart and never finish the transaction. Retargeting attempts to catch behaviors like that and adjust to display the items that the user showed interest in. I haven't been in that industry in years, but in the 2020s I can only expect much more nuanced systems based on ML. And everything falls apart without being able to keep a history of what you do and who you are. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

Iv 6y ago

You are not the target. Who do you think clicks on "10 hot girls want to see you NOW! click here!" or "Item you bought 6 month ago is now at a 50% sale!" I know some of the people who are the target. People who would buy 3 lifetime supplies of coffee because of a 20% sale. People who can't pass something framed as an exceptional offer. And of course, they are in debts. Fuck advertisement. It is preying on vulnerable people, it is making markets less efficient (by distorting information and urging consumers to not act rationally). Forbid this scam. Fund internet service in a saner way.

0xfffafaCrash 6y ago

This is called permission marketing and was advocated for most prominently by Seth Godin starting in the late 90’s. Unfortunately for every person in marketing who like Seth Godin cares even a little about things like privacy and consent, the marketing industry is full of thousands of people who would rather ram all kinds of ads as quickly and frequently as possible in front of every unwilling eyeball possible to try to brainwash as many impressionable people as possible into believing they need all kinds of things that they had no interest in previously. It’s a numbers game. They don’t just want to sell people things they want or need or would benefit from. They don’t even want to simply introduce people to unexpected solutions for problems they actually have. They want to do those things but they also want to exploit every psychological weakness possible to introduce new wants and new needs and new problems and insecurities into the consciousness of their targets because one can’t maximize sales without psychologically manipulating more people into thinking they want or need things they don’t. Ads are primarily exploiting impressionable insecure people with poor impulse control.

tylersmith 6y ago

What you do and buy is much more accurate information than what you say. A form of preferences will never be as effective as surveillance.

selykg 6y ago

I assume what people are interested in is one thing, but things they may _need_ is another. Being able to hoover up information that is more up to date than when you last filled out the survey means they could potentially be more accurate. i.e. You're shopping for some type of product, your search history and browser history indicates this, but is outside the realm of what you filled out in the survey. Being able to direct some ads that fit your current needs could be lucrative. I'm not an advertiser, but this is just my small bit of thought on it. Perhaps others are able to confirm or deny this is what's happening.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> trying guess what ads I might be interested in, No, they are trying to guess which add will produce the best return in terms of advertiser-sought behavioral changes if shown to you. That probably has some overlap with ads you are interested in, but it's not the same thing. > Did they ever think to just ask me? The ads that it is generally most valuable to show are the ones that the target wouldn't expect to have interest in. Advertising largely exists to create desire; if you ask people what advertising they'd like to see they will identify the advertising that would do the least to change their behavior from what it would be without the ads, which defeats the point. Untargeted ads would probably be more effective.

camycakes 6y ago

I like the idea of ad preferences built into the browser with an api that lets ad companies tap into what people actually want. It wouldn’t be invasive and it might actually generate better roi. The best person to market to after all is someone telling you “I want what you make”. This would also help the browser companies/organizations. Another note, Facebook and Google are both some of the largest companies in the world because of their advertising technology. We created them with our clicks.