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Personally, I'd just be happy to see adverts in the right language. Every major online advertising engine appears to assume that my geolocation equates to my p

by junto 14y ago

Personally, I'd just be happy to see adverts in the right language. Every major online advertising engine appears to assume that my geolocation equates to my preferred language. My browser passes the Accept-Language request header of en-GB, but they all ignore it and give me adverts in German or Spanish (or where ever I happen to be visiting or living) based on an IP-to-geolocation lookup. What I find interesting is that it firstly makes me actively aggressive towards the brands, as well as the site. Secondly, it increases my advertising blindness. I see this on Google Adsense and Facebook ads. I assume that in the United States, Spanish speakers are equally ignored? Any Spanish speakers in the US that can confirm this?

JacobAldridge 14y ago
I wonder if that's to do with the advertising network / provider placing the ads using geolocation, rather than language requests. I'm an Australian expat living in London - when I visit Australian news sites now they deliver me UK advertisements. Thankfully, no language issues in my instance.
loceng 14y ago
I wonder if the issue is resource and/or delivery time based. Is the number of people affected by this negatively, less than the delivery time or other costs when trying to facilitate this?
- junto 14y ago
  As you stated, I would imagine that the ad networks see people like me as a very small minority. However, there are particularly notable exceptions. There are ~11.5 million Catalan speakers in the world, and most of them in Spain. While the majority of Catalan speakers can also speak Spanish, they are extremely defensive of their language and you will find most road signs, governmental correspondence and general communication in Catalan as well as Spanish. Most Ad networks will shoe-horn these users into Spanish ads. I imagine some Catalonians find that practice offensive. When you compare the number of Norwegian speakers in the world (~5 million), it puts things into perspective. In actual fact these ad networks are missing a pretty big slice of the market when you add everything up. In Europe there are huge migrations of different nationalities. In a very short time the numbers of Greeks who leave Greece for other European countries will start to sky rocket. This open migration throughout Europe means that this problem will only get worse, and the numbers of people being mistargeted will increase. That is what I would call a market niche (or unique selling point) that is potentially up for grabs.
  - loceng 14y ago
    Maybe it is on their todo lists.. Perhaps they do serve that Catalan group, though you mentioned they do in fact get shoe-horned? You'd think someone would have solved this by now if it was valuable enough to?

by junto 14y ago

JacobAldridge 14y ago

I wonder if that's to do with the advertising network / provider placing the ads using geolocation, rather than language requests. I'm an Australian expat living in London - when I visit Australian news sites now they deliver me UK advertisements. Thankfully, no language issues in my instance.

loceng 14y ago

I wonder if the issue is resource and/or delivery time based. Is the number of people affected by this negatively, less than the delivery time or other costs when trying to facilitate this?

junto 14y ago
As you stated, I would imagine that the ad networks see people like me as a very small minority. However, there are particularly notable exceptions. There are ~11.5 million Catalan speakers in the world, and most of them in Spain. While the majority of Catalan speakers can also speak Spanish, they are extremely defensive of their language and you will find most road signs, governmental correspondence and general communication in Catalan as well as Spanish. Most Ad networks will shoe-horn these users into Spanish ads. I imagine some Catalonians find that practice offensive. When you compare the number of Norwegian speakers in the world (~5 million), it puts things into perspective. In actual fact these ad networks are missing a pretty big slice of the market when you add everything up. In Europe there are huge migrations of different nationalities. In a very short time the numbers of Greeks who leave Greece for other European countries will start to sky rocket. This open migration throughout Europe means that this problem will only get worse, and the numbers of people being mistargeted will increase. That is what I would call a market niche (or unique selling point) that is potentially up for grabs.
- loceng 14y ago
  Maybe it is on their todo lists.. Perhaps they do serve that Catalan group, though you mentioned they do in fact get shoe-horned? You'd think someone would have solved this by now if it was valuable enough to?