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This just cements my belief that advertisers no longer consider making people feel intruded upon by ads a bad thing - they directly target people who do not wan

by _jal 6y ago

This just cements my belief that advertisers no longer consider making people feel intruded upon by ads a bad thing - they directly target people who do not want to see their messaging. The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it. Fuck these people.

thrwaway-adtech 6y ago
It’s not that people who want ad-free experiences are targeted, it’s that people who have money to spare every month to buy a premium experience (in this case, not be annoyed by an ad), are highly correlated with people who you want to reach because they have money to buy your product, and that’s who they want to advertise to. Advertisers don’t want to be spending money to reach people who will never buy their product, either because they hate their ad or because they don’t have money, but unfortunately there is no way to know who these people are in advance. Spending $10/month to not look at text ads is a sure fire way to signal you have money so you aren’t in the later camp, and people who hate ads with a passion and won’t respond to them are rare in the wild (hn nonwithstanding :D) Too many people think they can monetize by just “sprinkle some ads on it” without thinking about why an advertiser would buy those ads.
- mahogany 6y ago
  Just to be pedantic (because I was a bit confused), the emphasis shouldn't really be on "targeted" because > and that’s who they want to advertise to is just a fancy way of saying "targeting". What I think you're saying is that it's not people who want ad-free experiences that are being targeted. Rather, those people belong to a broader group -- those with money to spend -- who are being targeted.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it. What part of the post you replied to indicates nonconsensual?
dalbasal 6y ago
Online advertisers are much simpler than that. They want sales, or signups or whatever acronym they need to force up. Group A converts at 10%. Group B at 1%. The advertiser may have a theory of why these groups are different. Increasingly, we don't. FB, especially, does a lot of automated targeting. Marketers tend to have good instincts about these things, because patterns are repetitive and simple. That said, I'm pretty confident that advertising to subscribers would be more effective than advertising to non subscribers. In my mind, "person who subscribed to a thing online" is just a good qualifier. It probably correlates to a lot of other qualities like "shops online often" or whatnot. Those "theories" don't really matter though. They're just a starting point. Advertisers don't know or care what people think of the ads nor how they make the 98.3% who didn't buy anything feel. All they know is that they didn't click/buy/whatever. I think people imagine online advertisers like a geekier version of mad men. It isn't like that. There's not the pretensions of understanding or influencing psychology. It's more like stock trading.

by _jal 6y ago

thrwaway-adtech 6y ago

It’s not that people who want ad-free experiences are targeted, it’s that people who have money to spare every month to buy a premium experience (in this case, not be annoyed by an ad), are highly correlated with people who you want to reach because they have money to buy your product, and that’s who they want to advertise to. Advertisers don’t want to be spending money to reach people who will never buy their product, either because they hate their ad or because they don’t have money, but unfortunately there is no way to know who these people are in advance. Spending $10/month to not look at text ads is a sure fire way to signal you have money so you aren’t in the later camp, and people who hate ads with a passion and won’t respond to them are rare in the wild (hn nonwithstanding :D) Too many people think they can monetize by just “sprinkle some ads on it” without thinking about why an advertiser would buy those ads.

mahogany 6y ago
Just to be pedantic (because I was a bit confused), the emphasis shouldn't really be on "targeted" because > and that’s who they want to advertise to is just a fancy way of saying "targeting". What I think you're saying is that it's not people who want ad-free experiences that are being targeted. Rather, those people belong to a broader group -- those with money to spend -- who are being targeted.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it. What part of the post you replied to indicates nonconsensual?

dalbasal 6y ago

Online advertisers are much simpler than that. They want sales, or signups or whatever acronym they need to force up. Group A converts at 10%. Group B at 1%. The advertiser may have a theory of why these groups are different. Increasingly, we don't. FB, especially, does a lot of automated targeting. Marketers tend to have good instincts about these things, because patterns are repetitive and simple. That said, I'm pretty confident that advertising to subscribers would be more effective than advertising to non subscribers. In my mind, "person who subscribed to a thing online" is just a good qualifier. It probably correlates to a lot of other qualities like "shops online often" or whatnot. Those "theories" don't really matter though. They're just a starting point. Advertisers don't know or care what people think of the ads nor how they make the 98.3% who didn't buy anything feel. All they know is that they didn't click/buy/whatever. I think people imagine online advertisers like a geekier version of mad men. It isn't like that. There's not the pretensions of understanding or influencing psychology. It's more like stock trading.