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Not sure; targeted ads can work pretty well for small niche businesses, getting the same amount of conversions through untargeted ads may not be feasible. I cou
by dividedbyzero 5y ago
Not sure; targeted ads can work pretty well for small niche businesses, getting the same amount of conversions through untargeted ads may not be feasible. I could imagine those getting hit harder by this change than, say, Uber, so probably not quite the same end result.
- chmod775 5y agoI could see that. But you can still effectively target niches with contextual ads.
- dividedbyzero 5y agoDefinitely. Is that something you can buy right now? I was under the impression there was little to nothing substantial in between untargeted and programmatic these days
- morelisp 5y agoWe've been slowly refactoring our products to offer more contextual possibilities (building more aggregations by domains, keywords, etc. instead of audiences). No one is interested in buying.
- tormeh 5y agoI bet this is a result of customer self-selection. This is all a hunch, but I bet a shit-ton that the advertisers who actually care about good targeting only buy from a small number of leading providers (Facebook, Google, etc.) whose stats are not going to show up on HN.
- morelisp 5y agoI am not involved at all in our sales department, and I have no interest in being identified, so I can't offer much more. We do have some very large customers, although we are not always a large account for them. But maybe you misunderstood - all our customers want "classical" audience targeting, to the point they're refusing contextual offerings even as GDPR regulations and technology changes make the audience-based products ever less efficient. If they want anything besides that, it's cohorts, which they don't really understand but see as a way to do targeting magically with storing cookies. If they want anything besides that, it's some BI assistance e.g. uplift models. Contextual is absolute last in line.
- tormeh 5y agoSounds like a principal-agent problem. The people actually buying the ads on behalf of the customer don't care about accuracy. Just train some model, no matter how shitty, and call it "best-effort". Boxes are checked and everyone's happy.