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Not sure about "healthy", but un-targeted advertising is a total waste of money, unless you're some big generic brand. High-value advertising revenue generally

Not sure about "healthy", but un-targeted advertising is a total waste of money, unless you're some big generic brand. High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users. Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.

criddell 6y ago
On Facebook, information that users voluntarily and explicitly provide is fair game for targeting IMHO. The rest should come from the content of the page.
- dhimes 6y ago
  If by "explicitly" you subsume "knowingly" then I agree.
  - criddell 6y ago
    I prefer explicitly. Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.
Nextgrid 6y ago
In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?
- gridlockd 6y ago
  > In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores. Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further. Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world" Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?
alexchamberlain 6y ago
Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for. On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  You don't need to know anything about a person to know that, at some point, they'll be hungry. So, if you're some company that happens to sell food nationally, you can just throw your ad at anybody. That's what I mean by "big generic brand". However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
- dialtone 6y ago
  I can buy ads generically on a site, but what happens after the user clicks on the ad or just views the ad and then buys the product? How do you keep track of this when you can't measure the effect? The only way is to measure some form of before/after analysis of your conversions with or without the marketing campaigns... Too much noise to be able to do that on the web.

criddell 6y ago

On Facebook, information that users voluntarily and explicitly provide is fair game for targeting IMHO. The rest should come from the content of the page.

dhimes 6y ago
If by "explicitly" you subsume "knowingly" then I agree.
- criddell 6y ago
  I prefer explicitly. Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.

Nextgrid 6y ago

In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?

gridlockd 6y ago
> In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online? Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores. Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further. Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world" Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?

alexchamberlain 6y ago

Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for. On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.

gridlockd 6y ago
You don't need to know anything about a person to know that, at some point, they'll be hungry. So, if you're some company that happens to sell food nationally, you can just throw your ad at anybody. That's what I mean by "big generic brand". However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
dialtone 6y ago
I can buy ads generically on a site, but what happens after the user clicks on the ad or just views the ad and then buys the product? How do you keep track of this when you can't measure the effect? The only way is to measure some form of before/after analysis of your conversions with or without the marketing campaigns... Too much noise to be able to do that on the web.