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Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally, where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillan

Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally, where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillance on the person searching. From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM. Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.

coliveira 5y ago
My opinion is that the target ads is just a cover, the real reason they want to track users is to give more data to their in-house AI system that learns what people do once they reach certain page. This knowledge (what people will do) is what is important to them, rather than simply showing certain ads. For example, if Google knows the profit potential of certain actions, they will raise the ad cost on that property by the true value, instead of relying on non-targeted auctions.
- nexuist 5y ago
  If this was true then every single ad campaign would be worth it then, no? I thought that lots of people try Google or FB ads with a couple thousand dollars and never recoup operating costs. If Google knows how much profit a certain page could bring then they could also tell you exactly what to price your product at to maximize returns.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    How would it profit Google?
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      They would charge you a fee for telling you that?
nwellnhof 5y ago
> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.
- nojito 5y ago
  Location targeting isn’t effective. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.1188 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118... Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Location data is very important for search. Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'. See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak. Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
    - codyb 5y ago
      Couldn’t just search for “pizza in Brooklyn” then? It’s not that onerous.
      - stubish 5y ago
        This isn't normal? Due to ISP internal networking, my exposed IP address either gets geolocated to my state capital or a state capital on the other side of the continent. And I like it that way. Wrong country might be annoying, but preferred language will get that right enough.
m463 5y ago
The word advertising itself has been co-opted. It is like "freedom" or "justice" that is ambiguous and means one thing to advertisers and another to the public. I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit "Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I really hate that “reasonably think” defense. Yes most people, including myself, did think that vitamin water was healthy until reading the nutritional sheet. It’s one step away from selling chocolate as, “good for you bars,” and claiming no reasonable person would think they’re good for you.
  - dcow 5y ago
    I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This drink has vitamins but please don't drink it persistently or you’ll develop type2 diabetes water? Relatively healthier than Coke but not as “healthy” as diet coke with added vitamins water? Does “smart water” make your smarter? Also most vitamins in dry form are mixed with 2-8 grams of sugar. Should those be renamed? The real tragedy is people are woefully undereducated on the damage that over consumption of carbohydrates and sugars does to your body. So even when they do look at the label and see 13 grams of sugar per serving and 2.5 servings per bottle (the comparable bottle of Coke has 55g sugars so you don't have to search it) they’re helpless. And that seems, as far as I can glean, to be a giant corpo-political conspiracy because we had a lot of grains and corn syrup in the US and needed to make people believe it was okay to consume it all despite conflicting science. “A healthy (carbohydrate filled) breakfast (of Cheerios) is good for the heart kids.” So if anyone is to blame it’s essentially ourselves for letting capitalists control the narrative around what goes into a healthy diet and lacking the political wherewithal to develop dietary recommendations that are based in science and not big cereal marketing. There it is: advertising.
paxys 5y ago
What research? Multiple companies which use these practices have grown from zero to trillion+ dollars in market cap, so I find it hard to believe the narrative that all of it is useless and ineffective.
- stubish 5y ago
  It doesn't have to work. Your customers just have to believe it works. Even just have to believe it might work, since they are looking for any competitive advantage. You need research to show it help just as much as you need research to show it doesn't. I think you will find both sorts of research, because it seems obvious that results will depend on what sort of web site you run and what sort of audience you have.
fvv 5y ago
I think that big corp must always grow (in earnings ) or various manager hierarchies start having problem.. sometimes this need forget to consider ethic , trust , monopoly , roots , ...
judge2020 5y ago
Note that contextual ads still perform better than personalized ads on search results, given how you still don’t see eg. Spotify ads on search results for anything other than music.
nom 5y ago
Can someone point me in the right direction regarding the mentioned research? My feeling is still that google know what they are doing when it comes to ads.
- QuadrupleA 5y ago
  See the other comments in this thread for a couple studies.
- meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  Or it's the "measure everything" culture having become self-reinforcing regardless of results or collateral damage.
dexen 5y ago
Insightful reasoning. The moat that Google built and maintains with privacy invasion is a legal moat rather than a business moat. A competing ad service, naturally much smaller at first, would be hard pressed to replicate[1] even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the costs involved. Even more importantly, a competing ad service would be nigh unable to replicate even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the legal protections and regulatory oversight of privacy. It is much easier for a large, well established business to "continue as it always did" and get either a nod of understanding, or at worst a slap on the wrist from the regulators - than for a newer, smaller player to start doing anything shady. In the later case, stiff penalties and "making an example of" can be expected for variety of reasons - the new player tends to not be well connected in the regulatory circles, and tends to be less influential on the local economy either, thus there's little downside for slapping the new player hard. This is yet another case where regulatory framework with somewhat arbitrary enforcement (relevant fines have wide ranges; judicial injunctions are optional and discretionary) entrenches and unfairly protects from competition the existing large market players. -- [1] sadly, ability to replicate minute features is key to provide "bullet-point engineering" and getting sales to casual buyers who are easily impressed by long feature list - and to advanced buyers who are trying to squeeze every last bit of advantage from the service.
j0ba 5y ago
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ Maybe they are more than just an ad company?
treeman79 5y ago
Worked in targeted ad tech for b2b. High dollar sales stuff. Short version. It works really well. Like absurdly well. Massive fear if browsers started limited cookies. As that would destroy the cash cow.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > b2b. High dollar sales stuff. I'd think this was the niche where it actually would perform.
urthor 5y ago
Knowing location data is not incremental, it's a crucial addition in order to cross sell other services. The future of Google maps is actually as a recommendation engine. They are adding icons now that are suggested by Google, and advertising that way.
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best but at their present scale this small improvement would mean a lot of money, wouldn't it? Lots of businesses find that it is harder to get significant gains (i think they call that the 'law of diminishing returns'), however the stock market is demanding steady growth figures. i guess location data is important for targeting of local services: you can't push an add for a specific restaurant to a person living in a different city; now if you know that he may be going to that city, then that's a slightly different thing. I think the alternative to all this tracking would be to push more yellow page directories like DMOZ or jasmine directories, but I don't know if you could do that in practice. Another direction would be to push a directory of specialized search engines, like duckduckgo bang! operators (shameless plug: here is my directory of these https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html )

coliveira 5y ago

My opinion is that the target ads is just a cover, the real reason they want to track users is to give more data to their in-house AI system that learns what people do once they reach certain page. This knowledge (what people will do) is what is important to them, rather than simply showing certain ads. For example, if Google knows the profit potential of certain actions, they will raise the ad cost on that property by the true value, instead of relying on non-targeted auctions.

nexuist 5y ago
If this was true then every single ad campaign would be worth it then, no? I thought that lots of people try Google or FB ads with a couple thousand dollars and never recoup operating costs. If Google knows how much profit a certain page could bring then they could also tell you exactly what to price your product at to maximize returns.
- kaba0 5y ago
  How would it profit Google?
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    They would charge you a fee for telling you that?

nwellnhof 5y ago

> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.

nojito 5y ago
Location targeting isn’t effective. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.1188 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118... Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Location data is very important for search. Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'. See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak. Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
  - codyb 5y ago
    Couldn’t just search for “pizza in Brooklyn” then? It’s not that onerous.
    - stubish 5y ago
      This isn't normal? Due to ISP internal networking, my exposed IP address either gets geolocated to my state capital or a state capital on the other side of the continent. And I like it that way. Wrong country might be annoying, but preferred language will get that right enough.

m463 5y ago

The word advertising itself has been co-opted. It is like "freedom" or "justice" that is ambiguous and means one thing to advertisers and another to the public. I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit "Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.

edgyquant 5y ago
I really hate that “reasonably think” defense. Yes most people, including myself, did think that vitamin water was healthy until reading the nutritional sheet. It’s one step away from selling chocolate as, “good for you bars,” and claiming no reasonable person would think they’re good for you.
- dcow 5y ago
  I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This drink has vitamins but please don't drink it persistently or you’ll develop type2 diabetes water? Relatively healthier than Coke but not as “healthy” as diet coke with added vitamins water? Does “smart water” make your smarter? Also most vitamins in dry form are mixed with 2-8 grams of sugar. Should those be renamed? The real tragedy is people are woefully undereducated on the damage that over consumption of carbohydrates and sugars does to your body. So even when they do look at the label and see 13 grams of sugar per serving and 2.5 servings per bottle (the comparable bottle of Coke has 55g sugars so you don't have to search it) they’re helpless. And that seems, as far as I can glean, to be a giant corpo-political conspiracy because we had a lot of grains and corn syrup in the US and needed to make people believe it was okay to consume it all despite conflicting science. “A healthy (carbohydrate filled) breakfast (of Cheerios) is good for the heart kids.” So if anyone is to blame it’s essentially ourselves for letting capitalists control the narrative around what goes into a healthy diet and lacking the political wherewithal to develop dietary recommendations that are based in science and not big cereal marketing. There it is: advertising.

paxys 5y ago

What research? Multiple companies which use these practices have grown from zero to trillion+ dollars in market cap, so I find it hard to believe the narrative that all of it is useless and ineffective.

stubish 5y ago
It doesn't have to work. Your customers just have to believe it works. Even just have to believe it might work, since they are looking for any competitive advantage. You need research to show it help just as much as you need research to show it doesn't. I think you will find both sorts of research, because it seems obvious that results will depend on what sort of web site you run and what sort of audience you have.

fvv 5y ago

I think that big corp must always grow (in earnings ) or various manager hierarchies start having problem.. sometimes this need forget to consider ethic , trust , monopoly , roots , ...

judge2020 5y ago

Note that contextual ads still perform better than personalized ads on search results, given how you still don’t see eg. Spotify ads on search results for anything other than music.

nom 5y ago

Can someone point me in the right direction regarding the mentioned research? My feeling is still that google know what they are doing when it comes to ads.

QuadrupleA 5y ago
See the other comments in this thread for a couple studies.
meltedcapacitor 5y ago
Or it's the "measure everything" culture having become self-reinforcing regardless of results or collateral damage.

dexen 5y ago

Insightful reasoning. The moat that Google built and maintains with privacy invasion is a legal moat rather than a business moat. A competing ad service, naturally much smaller at first, would be hard pressed to replicate[1] even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the costs involved. Even more importantly, a competing ad service would be nigh unable to replicate even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the legal protections and regulatory oversight of privacy. It is much easier for a large, well established business to "continue as it always did" and get either a nod of understanding, or at worst a slap on the wrist from the regulators - than for a newer, smaller player to start doing anything shady. In the later case, stiff penalties and "making an example of" can be expected for variety of reasons - the new player tends to not be well connected in the regulatory circles, and tends to be less influential on the local economy either, thus there's little downside for slapping the new player hard. This is yet another case where regulatory framework with somewhat arbitrary enforcement (relevant fines have wide ranges; judicial injunctions are optional and discretionary) entrenches and unfairly protects from competition the existing large market players. -- [1] sadly, ability to replicate minute features is key to provide "bullet-point engineering" and getting sales to casual buyers who are easily impressed by long feature list - and to advanced buyers who are trying to squeeze every last bit of advantage from the service.

j0ba 5y ago

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ Maybe they are more than just an ad company?

treeman79 5y ago

Worked in targeted ad tech for b2b. High dollar sales stuff. Short version. It works really well. Like absurdly well. Massive fear if browsers started limited cookies. As that would destroy the cash cow.

pessimizer 5y ago
> b2b. High dollar sales stuff. I'd think this was the niche where it actually would perform.

urthor 5y ago

Knowing location data is not incremental, it's a crucial addition in order to cross sell other services. The future of Google maps is actually as a recommendation engine. They are adding icons now that are suggested by Google, and advertising that way.

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best but at their present scale this small improvement would mean a lot of money, wouldn't it? Lots of businesses find that it is harder to get significant gains (i think they call that the 'law of diminishing returns'), however the stock market is demanding steady growth figures. i guess location data is important for targeting of local services: you can't push an add for a specific restaurant to a person living in a different city; now if you know that he may be going to that city, then that's a slightly different thing. I think the alternative to all this tracking would be to push more yellow page directories like DMOZ or jasmine directories, but I don't know if you could do that in practice. Another direction would be to push a directory of specialized search engines, like duckduckgo bang! operators (shameless plug: here is my directory of these https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html )