6 ms·

> 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 disregar

> 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...
  - resu_nimda 6y ago
    "Flowers" is one of the most ad-heavy queries out there. When I worked at Yahoo it was commonly used as the example to show or test some ad displays. Even on Google now you see only ad content above the fold.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  Google has backup strategies and could pivot fast, not without shedding a lot of people. You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad incentives, but it also provides support for cooky projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete lies. Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money, though.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Facebook might be more tied to ad money and I dislike them even more than I dislike Google but they actually sometimes manages to show me relevant ads - and unlike their "bigger brother" most of the time without insulting me and my family badly in the process ;-)
    - a_bonobo 6y ago
      I'm surprised how dodgy the Facebook and Twitter ads are. Maybe this is an Australian-localised thing influenced by all my various blockers and noscript extensions, but Twitter shows me 50% outright scams ('Twiggy Forrest says this is the deal of a lifetime!'), Facebook shows me 50% anime clothes which are clearly not officially made by Studio Ghibli. Amazing that this industry works.
- godshatter 6y ago
  I've wondered this, too. There have been maybe a handful of things I've found out about, gotten excited about, and went and purchased. At least since the days when I had to bug a parent to buy it for me (I'm in my 50s). In each case, I proactively went out and bought it on my own. I never clicked on the ad. I don't know if I ever have clicked on an ad, let alone bought something that way. I've been assuming I'm somewhere close to normal (definitely debatable) and that most people when they want to buy something just go and do it. How many people actually see an ad, get excited about it, click through, buy the product, and then come out of a kind of trance or something and wonder what caused them to do that? I'm probably more susceptible to candy displays at grocery check out counters than I am to online advertising. I'll occasionally buy one of those and tell the clerk it's an "impulse buy". I assume there's a reason this is a billion dollar industry, but if I'm the poor schlub they are targeting then I wonder how they even stay afloat.
maxbond 6y ago
I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad from the same company. On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily their intention, but they certainly decided to make that shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this action. Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times. Best and brightest, indeed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pb7 6y ago
  > I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad from the same company. I mean, if that’s all you search then...
  - salawat 6y ago
    >I mean, if that’s all you search then... That's the absolute wrong way to look at it. There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to square one. It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to twenty something with a smattering of mortgage offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a decision on which avenues to go down in order to further specialize. I actually messed around with it once to figure out what it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really change their estimate of my age (or they just think that every male on the internet is into 20 somethings). They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made travel reservations. Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense that Google would likely respond "You're using our service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it. They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates with a mental Tink Tink as the great data hoarding monolith known as Google does it's damnedest to sell me something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the process. And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes in the statistical voyeurism sense too! This would be the single most impactful way to return the Net to a repository of valuable information. Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in. But how will websites stay up without advertising, you might ask? I don't care. I host things I want out there. I find a way to account for it. If you want to present me first party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I'm okay with that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue maximization techniques.
Jestar342 6y ago
The last thread on HN regarding "smart" advertising (that I participated in) had a brilliant reply to my following anecdote: > I buy (electronic) gadgets all the time. Parts for PCs, Raspberry Pis, Arduino, "smart" devices to replace "dumb" devices like light bulbs, power sockets, equipment for race/flight simulation, etc. and adverts were usually just for the latest nVidia card or some games or something. Then there was that ONE TIME I bought a unicorn dress for my (then 2yo) daughter and that's it: Nothing but unicorn shit advertised at me for the rest of my life. and the reply was something like: > The fact that FAANG has spent what must be billions on specialised/targetted advertising and still can never show us adverts for anything other than stuff _we've already bought_ reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted advertising in my lifetime. and I have to say I agree.
- MagnumPIG 6y ago
  Part of this inaccuracy is on purpose. People can really freak the fuck out when you can predict what they need accurately. For example the real case of a store advertising specific baby items to someone who didn't know she was pregnant. This is why "suggested items" often have one wildcard thrown in: They don't want you to realize just how much they really know you. Of course this doesn't explain failures, but I wouldn't rule out smart ads just yet.
  - dchichkov 6y ago
    Hmm. Maybe this story was simply marketing of "perfect" advertisement services? Or an outlier?
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      I would have thought that HN readers would at least be somewhat tech savvy, but alas. Advertisement systems are way less advanced and much more stereotype driven, than privacy freaks care to acknowledge. Think of this - advertisers have less than 100ms to decide the best ad to show you... often multiple times per website. Do you really think that any ads are actually personalised? I remember having to differentiate between Bike Helmet for Barbie(a toy) and Barbie Bike Helmet(safety device for children)... Or the fact that if you let a learning algo run through the categories, they can place dildos(adult toys) right next to water guns(kids toys). There are services that target you with offers that are highly tailored*, but online ads are not one of those services. (Amazon's "You May also like", food delivery services suggestions, and similar things that can calculate for a long time)
philosopher1234 6y ago
It’s the invisible hand of the market. If it was wrong it would be inefficient and change so it must be right and you’re wrong! My towel is also damp if you can’t tell
naravara 6y ago
>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?) I seem to remember an article a long time ago that pulled back the curtain on a lot of these niche dating sites. Apparently it's all basically just a single backend with a whole bunch of different front ends and they just use attributes to decide which niches you could potentially fall it. It has the effect of having lots of niches for people to sign up for, but a bigger user base in each one since they're basically pulling names out of a common dating pool. The example in the article was that there was one site specifically for dating farmers and one sight specifically for dating within some specific religious denomination. But if you identified your religion in the farmer ones people in the religious one would see your profile too and vice versa. And, of course, the whole thing was just lousy with bots and scammers. I read this article ages ago though. At least 6 or 7 years. I'd be surprised if that dynamic was still working.
NoodleIncident 6y ago
I think that technically, Google and Facebook aren't to blame for these ads. They can slap as many labels on their users as they want, but it's up to the advertiser (at least on facebook) whether they want to target based on those categories and interests, or if they just use the default 18-35 (male) targeting that they think will work better. One of the reasons I started blocking ads on youtube was the unskippable horror movie ads; I can imagine that it would be hard to narrow down "interest in horror movies" from your internet data, so they just target everyone, no matter how much I adjusted my advertising interests.
JAlexoid 6y ago
FYI: Google doesn't choose what's the best content for you - we're not there yet. The advertiser chooses to target you. Let alone - they are completely oblivious to your relationship status or you having kids.

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...
- resu_nimda 6y ago
  "Flowers" is one of the most ad-heavy queries out there. When I worked at Yahoo it was commonly used as the example to show or test some ad displays. Even on Google now you see only ad content above the fold.
JAlexoid 6y ago
Google has backup strategies and could pivot fast, not without shedding a lot of people. You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad incentives, but it also provides support for cooky projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete lies. Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money, though.
- eitland 6y ago
  Facebook might be more tied to ad money and I dislike them even more than I dislike Google but they actually sometimes manages to show me relevant ads - and unlike their "bigger brother" most of the time without insulting me and my family badly in the process ;-)
  - a_bonobo 6y ago
    I'm surprised how dodgy the Facebook and Twitter ads are. Maybe this is an Australian-localised thing influenced by all my various blockers and noscript extensions, but Twitter shows me 50% outright scams ('Twiggy Forrest says this is the deal of a lifetime!'), Facebook shows me 50% anime clothes which are clearly not officially made by Studio Ghibli. Amazing that this industry works.
godshatter 6y ago
I've wondered this, too. There have been maybe a handful of things I've found out about, gotten excited about, and went and purchased. At least since the days when I had to bug a parent to buy it for me (I'm in my 50s). In each case, I proactively went out and bought it on my own. I never clicked on the ad. I don't know if I ever have clicked on an ad, let alone bought something that way. I've been assuming I'm somewhere close to normal (definitely debatable) and that most people when they want to buy something just go and do it. How many people actually see an ad, get excited about it, click through, buy the product, and then come out of a kind of trance or something and wonder what caused them to do that? I'm probably more susceptible to candy displays at grocery check out counters than I am to online advertising. I'll occasionally buy one of those and tell the clerk it's an "impulse buy". I assume there's a reason this is a billion dollar industry, but if I'm the poor schlub they are targeting then I wonder how they even stay afloat.

maxbond 6y ago

I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad from the same company. On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily their intention, but they certainly decided to make that shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this action. Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times. Best and brightest, indeed.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pb7 6y ago
> I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad from the same company. I mean, if that’s all you search then...
- salawat 6y ago
  >I mean, if that’s all you search then... That's the absolute wrong way to look at it. There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to square one. It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to twenty something with a smattering of mortgage offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a decision on which avenues to go down in order to further specialize. I actually messed around with it once to figure out what it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really change their estimate of my age (or they just think that every male on the internet is into 20 somethings). They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made travel reservations. Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense that Google would likely respond "You're using our service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it. They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates with a mental Tink Tink as the great data hoarding monolith known as Google does it's damnedest to sell me something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the process. And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes in the statistical voyeurism sense too! This would be the single most impactful way to return the Net to a repository of valuable information. Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in. But how will websites stay up without advertising, you might ask? I don't care. I host things I want out there. I find a way to account for it. If you want to present me first party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I'm okay with that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue maximization techniques.

Jestar342 6y ago

The last thread on HN regarding "smart" advertising (that I participated in) had a brilliant reply to my following anecdote: > I buy (electronic) gadgets all the time. Parts for PCs, Raspberry Pis, Arduino, "smart" devices to replace "dumb" devices like light bulbs, power sockets, equipment for race/flight simulation, etc. and adverts were usually just for the latest nVidia card or some games or something. Then there was that ONE TIME I bought a unicorn dress for my (then 2yo) daughter and that's it: Nothing but unicorn shit advertised at me for the rest of my life. and the reply was something like: > The fact that FAANG has spent what must be billions on specialised/targetted advertising and still can never show us adverts for anything other than stuff _we've already bought_ reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted advertising in my lifetime. and I have to say I agree.

MagnumPIG 6y ago
Part of this inaccuracy is on purpose. People can really freak the fuck out when you can predict what they need accurately. For example the real case of a store advertising specific baby items to someone who didn't know she was pregnant. This is why "suggested items" often have one wildcard thrown in: They don't want you to realize just how much they really know you. Of course this doesn't explain failures, but I wouldn't rule out smart ads just yet.
- dchichkov 6y ago
  Hmm. Maybe this story was simply marketing of "perfect" advertisement services? Or an outlier?
  - JAlexoid 6y ago
    I would have thought that HN readers would at least be somewhat tech savvy, but alas. Advertisement systems are way less advanced and much more stereotype driven, than privacy freaks care to acknowledge. Think of this - advertisers have less than 100ms to decide the best ad to show you... often multiple times per website. Do you really think that any ads are actually personalised? I remember having to differentiate between Bike Helmet for Barbie(a toy) and Barbie Bike Helmet(safety device for children)... Or the fact that if you let a learning algo run through the categories, they can place dildos(adult toys) right next to water guns(kids toys). There are services that target you with offers that are highly tailored*, but online ads are not one of those services. (Amazon's "You May also like", food delivery services suggestions, and similar things that can calculate for a long time)

philosopher1234 6y ago

It’s the invisible hand of the market. If it was wrong it would be inefficient and change so it must be right and you’re wrong! My towel is also damp if you can’t tell

naravara 6y ago

>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?) I seem to remember an article a long time ago that pulled back the curtain on a lot of these niche dating sites. Apparently it's all basically just a single backend with a whole bunch of different front ends and they just use attributes to decide which niches you could potentially fall it. It has the effect of having lots of niches for people to sign up for, but a bigger user base in each one since they're basically pulling names out of a common dating pool. The example in the article was that there was one site specifically for dating farmers and one sight specifically for dating within some specific religious denomination. But if you identified your religion in the farmer ones people in the religious one would see your profile too and vice versa. And, of course, the whole thing was just lousy with bots and scammers. I read this article ages ago though. At least 6 or 7 years. I'd be surprised if that dynamic was still working.

NoodleIncident 6y ago

I think that technically, Google and Facebook aren't to blame for these ads. They can slap as many labels on their users as they want, but it's up to the advertiser (at least on facebook) whether they want to target based on those categories and interests, or if they just use the default 18-35 (male) targeting that they think will work better. One of the reasons I started blocking ads on youtube was the unskippable horror movie ads; I can imagine that it would be hard to narrow down "interest in horror movies" from your internet data, so they just target everyone, no matter how much I adjusted my advertising interests.

JAlexoid 6y ago

FYI: Google doesn't choose what's the best content for you - we're not there yet. The advertiser chooses to target you. Let alone - they are completely oblivious to your relationship status or you having kids.