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> "Inside the ads group, Teresi has talked up expanding the business significantly. It’s generating about $4 billion in revenue annually, and he wants to increa

> "Inside the ads group, Teresi has talked up expanding the business significantly. It’s generating about $4 billion in revenue annually, and he wants to increase that to the double digits. That means Apple needs to crank up its efforts. "[0] This doesn't mean they need to do it with targeting/data mining. I swear all the data mining does is show me ads for stuff I just purchased 3 days ago, and that's with google-level surveillance.

bloppe 4y ago
They either have to do way more ads, or way more targeted ads. Would you prefer an endless stream of low-relevance ads, or a few high-relevance ones that required massive amounts of data mining to produce?
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  Definitely the former. Also the actual difference between "endless" and "few" is like 3 (by price)? If all this additional surveillance, sorry "targeting", is that worthless why should we even consider allowing it?
reitanqild 4y ago
I don't like the idea that we discuss this as a law of nature. I am an iPhone user since three years ago but if at some point I get a better deal elsewhere, I'm off. And with Apple I pay extra for premium, and there is only so many ads[1] one can shove in before the premium feel is gone. As for the targeted ads, I share your feeling that the targeting is badly over hyped, except you are lucky compared to me: Ads for products I bought 3 days ago would be wildly relevant compared to most of the ads I can remember from Google. It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Don't know what I did wrong but it seems there was a fluke with my account. Or they just god more money from scammy-looking dating sites than from anyone else. Oh, and when it wasn't ads for scammy-looking dating sites it was pay-to-win games, and based on the ads you could be forgiven for thinking they were made by the same folks. [1]: I'm no hardliner here: contrary to many on HN I actually see value in some ads and think I have sometimes made better purchases/been reminded to do things I wanted to do anyway.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Every time people tell me that AI is great, I remind them that the most frequent ads I see are: 'Goth Muslim hookups' and 'automatic chicken coop door'.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    It unfortunately seems to work if you don't go out of your way to block all trackers everywhere and never sign up for anything. I don't personally get any ads I would ever give a crap about, but my wife has been complaining like crazy and constantly blowing up our family plan with data overages since I started ad-blocking at the DNS level because she's constantly being served ads for stuff she actually wants and tries to click on it only to get blocked by my DNS server when it tries to go through a known tracker redirect to grab conversion stats for their campaign or whatever, and then she switches from WiFi to data in order to use the ISP's DNS instead.

bloppe 4y ago

They either have to do way more ads, or way more targeted ads. Would you prefer an endless stream of low-relevance ads, or a few high-relevance ones that required massive amounts of data mining to produce?

diffeomorphism 4y ago
Definitely the former. Also the actual difference between "endless" and "few" is like 3 (by price)? If all this additional surveillance, sorry "targeting", is that worthless why should we even consider allowing it?

reitanqild 4y ago

I don't like the idea that we discuss this as a law of nature. I am an iPhone user since three years ago but if at some point I get a better deal elsewhere, I'm off. And with Apple I pay extra for premium, and there is only so many ads[1] one can shove in before the premium feel is gone. As for the targeted ads, I share your feeling that the targeting is badly over hyped, except you are lucky compared to me: Ads for products I bought 3 days ago would be wildly relevant compared to most of the ads I can remember from Google. It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Don't know what I did wrong but it seems there was a fluke with my account. Or they just god more money from scammy-looking dating sites than from anyone else. Oh, and when it wasn't ads for scammy-looking dating sites it was pay-to-win games, and based on the ads you could be forgiven for thinking they were made by the same folks. [1]: I'm no hardliner here: contrary to many on HN I actually see value in some ads and think I have sometimes made better purchases/been reminded to do things I wanted to do anyway.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Every time people tell me that AI is great, I remind them that the most frequent ads I see are: 'Goth Muslim hookups' and 'automatic chicken coop door'.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  It unfortunately seems to work if you don't go out of your way to block all trackers everywhere and never sign up for anything. I don't personally get any ads I would ever give a crap about, but my wife has been complaining like crazy and constantly blowing up our family plan with data overages since I started ad-blocking at the DNS level because she's constantly being served ads for stuff she actually wants and tries to click on it only to get blocked by my DNS server when it tries to go through a known tracker redirect to grab conversion stats for their campaign or whatever, and then she switches from WiFi to data in order to use the ISP's DNS instead.