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"Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks. It isn't good for consumers whose privacy is being violated as they are being annoyed

"Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks. It isn't good for consumers whose privacy is being violated as they are being annoyed with unwanted, irrelevant ads and they get charged higher prices due to the cost of the advertising. It isn't good for companies buying the ads by participating in sham "auctions" with no real insight into or control over the process. They are literally begging to be ripped off. It doesn't have to be this way. "Context sensitive" advertising is more privacy respecting, easier to implement and monitor and can be more cost effective. Example: The fact that I recently shopped for and bought a car is no reason to show me auto ads on a web site devoted to pet supplies. There is a logical disconnect here because context is ignored in favor of "personalization". Those paying for these dumb "personalized" ads are wasting their money and my time and bandwidth because I already made a purchase. I'm not making another one any time soon. By the way, this doesn't really happen to me any more because I now block these "personalized" ad networks. And you should too --- it's the only logical recourse to this stupidity.

Symbiote 1y ago
The other case for personalised advertising is when a purchase is almost made. I was recently searching for a toy across Etsy, Ali Express, eBay. I didn't buy it. A day later, I saw 'suggested' purchases on Amazon for the same toy. I boycott Amazon, so I don't often visit their website. I normally block (successfully?) almost all of this advertising, so I find it particularly creepy when I receive it.
johannes1234321 1y ago
> It doesn't have to be this way. "Context sensitive" advertising is more privacy respecting, easier to implement and monitor and can be more cost effective. This is what launched Google's money printing machine: Showing ads matching the current intent (current search) thus solving a current problem.
- jonplackett 1y ago
  I actually dislike this sort of advertising even more. Because it pretends to be the solution to your current problem when often it’s not. At least out-of-context ads can be more easily ignored.
fvdessen 1y ago
I believe the main purpose of tracking based advertising is to know your gender, politics and social class to show you the right kind of car and pet supply. This discrimination is quite important and before internet people would self discriminate on those basis and buy different magasines, see different movies, walk different streets and advertisers could target their demographics based on that. Now everybody goes to the same social networks so the tracking is used to provide this discrimination A good example is gym membership. There's 20eur/month and 300eur/month ones. The 300eur/month ones really don't want to advertise to everybody, they have a really specific demographic target in mind.
figassis 1y ago
I agree. But in the crappy experience topic, it seems to me that this is just bad engineering. If I were to build an algo to show personalized ads, I would definitely account for the likelihood of someone wanting to buy 2 consecutive cars vs a car and maybe some car related products. How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day.
- piva00 1y ago
  There's no incentive for the ad platforms to account for that, real-time bidding will make money for them no matter the experience of the ad being showed. If you get another ad for a product you already bought the advertiser already paid for placement, a click through is just a bonus on top of that. Even more when information is so secretly guarded that any analysis of the impact of an ad is extremely flawed, it hasn't solved the old adage from John Wanamaker: > Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half It's meant to be that way, the ad platforms do not want advertisers to know what is waste and optimise their ads further than what's needed to keep them advertising, they just need to throw some bones here and there, convert a few people through clicks, to make themselves look indispensable. There's no incentive to improve that, at all.
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day. Easy --- advertisers pay for bad ads the same as good ones --- why bother stopping the bad ones? Convincing so many advertisers to just blindly trust the system and buy into the concept of black box "personalized" advertising is actually the real marketing coup here. According to some stats, global use of ad blockers is now over 40%. Once it exceeds 50%, I believe this stupidity will slowly start to die out.
PaulKeeble 1y ago
They are so dumb too. It rarely actually presents ads for things I might be interested in as I search but once I buy something they will follow me for a week. Buying an item seems to be a much stronger signal to them, it makes very little sense how this currently works. Seeing ads appropriate to a site however makes me a bit wary of the site itself, it needs enough difference to the context to not harm the sites reputation.
beejiu 1y ago
> "Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks. According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year. As much as the Hacker News crowd hates on ads, it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy. https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/ https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/
- mdhb 1y ago
  JFC… I’m begging for you to please think about things like this in ways that aren’t strictly about “the economy”. It’s so so so clearly a net loss for society it’s not even close. You have to literally ignore everything else other than this idea of “shareholder value” to come to such a ridiculous position.
- unicamelkje 1y ago
  Not sure if relying on research made by an advertising company, about it's own positive impact, is something that you should blindly trust.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  You mean the same Meta and their ads and data collection that have been directly and indisputably linked to literal, actual Genocides? And teen suicides? And Cambridge Analytica? Oh, but they shuffled some money around the economy (mostly into their coffers), so it was all worth it in the end, because as we all know the magic economy is the only thing that matters.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  I think what many of us question is whether nor not those same $0.5 trillion would be generated by contextual ads. There's no doubt that ads work, but we really don't know to what extend. E.g. if I'm on a pages looking at watches, should I get ads for watches, or would it be better to show ads for the washing machine I was looking up last night? Google, the search engine, clearly thinks it's better to show ads relevant to my search term, but they are also in a special position that's not applicable to a news website. People working in the field has also previously commented, here on HN, that the ad networks are basically hustling the advertisers, selling them ad space / users that they know will perform badly, to move more "inventory". That generates economical activity, but does that benefit anyone beyond the ad networks?
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> It isn't good for companies buying the ads by participating in sham "auctions" with no real insight into or control over the process. They are literally begging to be ripped off. You seem to think that companies have a choice. I've been advertising for years, Google has been rolling out the standard ads in favor of automated "personalized" one for a long time. They kept removing features again and again. In more of removing features and making basic ads impossible to use, they have a team of people that will keep calling you and to offer you 'guidance' on how to run your ads. These guidance almost always revolved around enabling the automatic advertising algorithms and disabling your old school ads. I consider myself quite smart with internet things but even me, at some point, got baited into switching to these automated ads because at the end you run a business that is completely different from marketing and it's not your core business. You're not expert into marketing and especially not into Google ads so it's easy for these experts to trick you. I have seen my money syphoned by these automatic techniques with quite bad roi. And all these self made people or very small companies (which represent the vast majority of the business), they are just as easy target for Google than I was. Big companies can afford ads consultant that will run the advertising campaigns and optimize everything, but small ones are stuck doing things themselves on a system that is purposely made to hand over your money and let the computer do it's 'magic' with targeted advertising. And if you're not happy with Google, what you gonna do ? It's not like there is competition. Everyone use Google, Google is a monopoly. I tried switching to bing ads, Facebook ads, but its just not possible. No one use bing. Facebook leads were never as profitable as Google one, at least in the market I advertised.
- bandrami 1y ago
  You know you don't actually need Google to advertise, right? I was hosting websites in 1998 when Google was still in Larry Page's garage. We sold ads the same way magazines and newspapers always have: we had a sales staff and they did their job well. There's no reason we can't go back to that.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1y ago
HenryBemis 1y ago
> are wasting their money and my time and bandwidth _You_ think it doesn't work, but it does. Or at least 'on average' it does. As for your time, perhaps you value your time. But again, 'on average', there are so many people spending hours and hours on Insta, TT, etc. and those people clearly don't care about focus/time/ads, because it is their (mental/spiritual) bread and butter. When a young woman 'follows' 100 'influencers' and each posts twice per day, that young woman consumes at least two hundred ads per day and if she buys at least one item per day, that's a win for 'them'. Regarding the car/pet scenario, if they are any good they should be advertising stuff to clean dog piss, brushes, etc.. items that "will keep your car clean when you got a pet". But again.. it works. People make money.
Aloisius 1y ago
Have you considered that you blocking personalized ad networks might, perhaps, have led to you seeing poorly personalized ads? Like say, advertising a car to you after you recently purchased one?

Symbiote 1y ago

The other case for personalised advertising is when a purchase is almost made. I was recently searching for a toy across Etsy, Ali Express, eBay. I didn't buy it. A day later, I saw 'suggested' purchases on Amazon for the same toy. I boycott Amazon, so I don't often visit their website. I normally block (successfully?) almost all of this advertising, so I find it particularly creepy when I receive it.

johannes1234321 1y ago

> It doesn't have to be this way. "Context sensitive" advertising is more privacy respecting, easier to implement and monitor and can be more cost effective. This is what launched Google's money printing machine: Showing ads matching the current intent (current search) thus solving a current problem.

jonplackett 1y ago
I actually dislike this sort of advertising even more. Because it pretends to be the solution to your current problem when often it’s not. At least out-of-context ads can be more easily ignored.

fvdessen 1y ago

I believe the main purpose of tracking based advertising is to know your gender, politics and social class to show you the right kind of car and pet supply. This discrimination is quite important and before internet people would self discriminate on those basis and buy different magasines, see different movies, walk different streets and advertisers could target their demographics based on that. Now everybody goes to the same social networks so the tracking is used to provide this discrimination A good example is gym membership. There's 20eur/month and 300eur/month ones. The 300eur/month ones really don't want to advertise to everybody, they have a really specific demographic target in mind.

figassis 1y ago

I agree. But in the crappy experience topic, it seems to me that this is just bad engineering. If I were to build an algo to show personalized ads, I would definitely account for the likelihood of someone wanting to buy 2 consecutive cars vs a car and maybe some car related products. How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day.

piva00 1y ago
There's no incentive for the ad platforms to account for that, real-time bidding will make money for them no matter the experience of the ad being showed. If you get another ad for a product you already bought the advertiser already paid for placement, a click through is just a bonus on top of that. Even more when information is so secretly guarded that any analysis of the impact of an ad is extremely flawed, it hasn't solved the old adage from John Wanamaker: > Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half It's meant to be that way, the ad platforms do not want advertisers to know what is waste and optimise their ads further than what's needed to keep them advertising, they just need to throw some bones here and there, convert a few people through clicks, to make themselves look indispensable. There's no incentive to improve that, at all.
jqpabc123 1y ago
How was that decision made, because it seems that an entire industry adopted this and called it a day. Easy --- advertisers pay for bad ads the same as good ones --- why bother stopping the bad ones? Convincing so many advertisers to just blindly trust the system and buy into the concept of black box "personalized" advertising is actually the real marketing coup here. According to some stats, global use of ad blockers is now over 40%. Once it exceeds 50%, I believe this stupidity will slowly start to die out.

PaulKeeble 1y ago

They are so dumb too. It rarely actually presents ads for things I might be interested in as I search but once I buy something they will follow me for a week. Buying an item seems to be a much stronger signal to them, it makes very little sense how this currently works. Seeing ads appropriate to a site however makes me a bit wary of the site itself, it needs enough difference to the context to not harm the sites reputation.

beejiu 1y ago

> "Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks. According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year. As much as the Hacker News crowd hates on ads, it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy. https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/ https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/

mdhb 1y ago
JFC… I’m begging for you to please think about things like this in ways that aren’t strictly about “the economy”. It’s so so so clearly a net loss for society it’s not even close. You have to literally ignore everything else other than this idea of “shareholder value” to come to such a ridiculous position.
unicamelkje 1y ago
Not sure if relying on research made by an advertising company, about it's own positive impact, is something that you should blindly trust.
sensanaty 1y ago
You mean the same Meta and their ads and data collection that have been directly and indisputably linked to literal, actual Genocides? And teen suicides? And Cambridge Analytica? Oh, but they shuffled some money around the economy (mostly into their coffers), so it was all worth it in the end, because as we all know the magic economy is the only thing that matters.
mrweasel 1y ago
I think what many of us question is whether nor not those same $0.5 trillion would be generated by contextual ads. There's no doubt that ads work, but we really don't know to what extend. E.g. if I'm on a pages looking at watches, should I get ads for watches, or would it be better to show ads for the washing machine I was looking up last night? Google, the search engine, clearly thinks it's better to show ads relevant to my search term, but they are also in a special position that's not applicable to a news website. People working in the field has also previously commented, here on HN, that the ad networks are basically hustling the advertisers, selling them ad space / users that they know will perform badly, to move more "inventory". That generates economical activity, but does that benefit anyone beyond the ad networks?

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> It isn't good for companies buying the ads by participating in sham "auctions" with no real insight into or control over the process. They are literally begging to be ripped off. You seem to think that companies have a choice. I've been advertising for years, Google has been rolling out the standard ads in favor of automated "personalized" one for a long time. They kept removing features again and again. In more of removing features and making basic ads impossible to use, they have a team of people that will keep calling you and to offer you 'guidance' on how to run your ads. These guidance almost always revolved around enabling the automatic advertising algorithms and disabling your old school ads. I consider myself quite smart with internet things but even me, at some point, got baited into switching to these automated ads because at the end you run a business that is completely different from marketing and it's not your core business. You're not expert into marketing and especially not into Google ads so it's easy for these experts to trick you. I have seen my money syphoned by these automatic techniques with quite bad roi. And all these self made people or very small companies (which represent the vast majority of the business), they are just as easy target for Google than I was. Big companies can afford ads consultant that will run the advertising campaigns and optimize everything, but small ones are stuck doing things themselves on a system that is purposely made to hand over your money and let the computer do it's 'magic' with targeted advertising. And if you're not happy with Google, what you gonna do ? It's not like there is competition. Everyone use Google, Google is a monopoly. I tried switching to bing ads, Facebook ads, but its just not possible. No one use bing. Facebook leads were never as profitable as Google one, at least in the market I advertised.

bandrami 1y ago
You know you don't actually need Google to advertise, right? I was hosting websites in 1998 when Google was still in Larry Page's garage. We sold ads the same way magazines and newspapers always have: we had a sales staff and they did their job well. There's no reason we can't go back to that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 1y ago

HenryBemis 1y ago

> are wasting their money and my time and bandwidth _You_ think it doesn't work, but it does. Or at least 'on average' it does. As for your time, perhaps you value your time. But again, 'on average', there are so many people spending hours and hours on Insta, TT, etc. and those people clearly don't care about focus/time/ads, because it is their (mental/spiritual) bread and butter. When a young woman 'follows' 100 'influencers' and each posts twice per day, that young woman consumes at least two hundred ads per day and if she buys at least one item per day, that's a win for 'them'. Regarding the car/pet scenario, if they are any good they should be advertising stuff to clean dog piss, brushes, etc.. items that "will keep your car clean when you got a pet". But again.. it works. People make money.

Aloisius 1y ago

Have you considered that you blocking personalized ad networks might, perhaps, have led to you seeing poorly personalized ads? Like say, advertising a car to you after you recently purchased one?