4 ms·

And all that tracking comes down with inability to take risk on business side. Ad company wants to be 100% sure that ads are shown to humans, and pay only for t

And all that tracking comes down with inability to take risk on business side. Ad company wants to be 100% sure that ads are shown to humans, and pay only for those shown to humans(going deeper - to specific cohorts of humans, which in the past was approximated by content of the site showing ads). Whereas sites serving ads want to extract as much money as it is possible from advertisers based on their audience count. The incentives are on both sides to to one-up each other without tracking - hosts by inflating visitor numbers, advertisers by disputing that. In a perfect world ad(wouldn't exist i know but bear with that) companies would pay X/month for site with Y visitors, where X depends on Y. No need for tracking, and roughly over multiple sites and multiple months it averages out. Not enough conversion rates(risk for ad company - they could pay less)? offer lower rate per visitor next period. Site gets spike in visitors(risk for host - they could charge more)? report higher estimated Y for next period. What we got instead is an insane tracking infrastructure that costs way more than any possible profit gained for both sides. It's not even profit - it's avoiding being 'scammed', avoiding risk. Remember that all that tracking bullshit started before targeted advertising was mainstream and widespread. It all started with bots and inflated click numbers, and inability to accept risk. Tl;dr banning targeted advertising won't remove all tracking bullshit

joenot443 3y ago
Well said. It's frustrating seeing people earnestly pretending as if the 'solution' we're living with now is any kind of improvement.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
Without regulation, how do you expect this market to change?
- Xelbair 3y ago
  without total removal of advertising industry? no change, they will try to find all the ways to skim around the law because they are so entrenched. I'll take regulated market over unregulated one though.
pas 3y ago
sites know their audience, they know their usual impressions, and that's how marketing saleshouses functioned for about one-two decade(s). it's much simpler for both sides, no crying about bots, etc. of course it's not great if you want to target Putin et al. ( https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad... ) ad networks can simply send out banners to sites for time slots, and that's it. do you want to advertise healthy food? send it to yoga sites (insert it on #yoga hashtag profile pages, insert it after videos/snaps/tiktoks/reels that the AI categorized as yoga, etc.) ... it's called item-to-item recommendation (use the content of the page - as it was done for - again - decades) it's perfectly possible to ban and remove tracking bullshit
- tekknik 3y ago
  Hmm, what if people outside of yoga like health food? Or what if some people at the yoga site instead eat fried food but just have a good exercise routine? your solution here just makes ads less valuable, which isn’t a win for advertisers or sites. if you can remove tracking, and still allow targeting, then you’ve hit gold. short of that you won’t find meaningful buy-in.
  - pas 3y ago
    Ad networks can offer to optimize the impressions, help to with targeting. After all the current implicit user profiling and targeting is already not a 100%. Many people use adblockers, many devices are used by more than one user, etc. (In this day and age we are still baffled how Amazon/Google/whatever advertises us - for days - the same fucking thing we just purchased yesterday. Of course, because based on their model it's still the most likely thing the user might buy or click on, etc.) Google seems to be already moving away from individual profiles with FLoC - of course they still want all of the data to be able do dynamically allocate users to cohorts (to maximize their profits). And this is why Tiktok and Instagram just went ahead and are now doing direct sales. (They put a link on the video overlay where the user can go and buy whatever shit the video talks about.) > isn’t a win for [...] sites this is something that a lot of people are pushing back on, because their claim is that we need some slack in the system for sites to be able to pursue their own creative vision (however lame, banal, mundane, or seemingly useless it is). before every click was tracked it was okay if some article (or video) underperformed, because in general the advertiser got the increased sales (or brand awareness or whatever they measured)

joenot443 3y ago

Well said. It's frustrating seeing people earnestly pretending as if the 'solution' we're living with now is any kind of improvement.

thomastjeffery 3y ago

Without regulation, how do you expect this market to change?

Xelbair 3y ago
without total removal of advertising industry? no change, they will try to find all the ways to skim around the law because they are so entrenched. I'll take regulated market over unregulated one though.

pas 3y ago

sites know their audience, they know their usual impressions, and that's how marketing saleshouses functioned for about one-two decade(s). it's much simpler for both sides, no crying about bots, etc. of course it's not great if you want to target Putin et al. ( https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ads-to-find-targets-and-vladimir-putin/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad... ) ad networks can simply send out banners to sites for time slots, and that's it. do you want to advertise healthy food? send it to yoga sites (insert it on #yoga hashtag profile pages, insert it after videos/snaps/tiktoks/reels that the AI categorized as yoga, etc.) ... it's called item-to-item recommendation (use the content of the page - as it was done for - again - decades) it's perfectly possible to ban and remove tracking bullshit

tekknik 3y ago
Hmm, what if people outside of yoga like health food? Or what if some people at the yoga site instead eat fried food but just have a good exercise routine? your solution here just makes ads less valuable, which isn’t a win for advertisers or sites. if you can remove tracking, and still allow targeting, then you’ve hit gold. short of that you won’t find meaningful buy-in.
- pas 3y ago
  Ad networks can offer to optimize the impressions, help to with targeting. After all the current implicit user profiling and targeting is already not a 100%. Many people use adblockers, many devices are used by more than one user, etc. (In this day and age we are still baffled how Amazon/Google/whatever advertises us - for days - the same fucking thing we just purchased yesterday. Of course, because based on their model it's still the most likely thing the user might buy or click on, etc.) Google seems to be already moving away from individual profiles with FLoC - of course they still want all of the data to be able do dynamically allocate users to cohorts (to maximize their profits). And this is why Tiktok and Instagram just went ahead and are now doing direct sales. (They put a link on the video overlay where the user can go and buy whatever shit the video talks about.) > isn’t a win for [...] sites this is something that a lot of people are pushing back on, because their claim is that we need some slack in the system for sites to be able to pursue their own creative vision (however lame, banal, mundane, or seemingly useless it is). before every click was tracked it was okay if some article (or video) underperformed, because in general the advertiser got the increased sales (or brand awareness or whatever they measured)