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Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; in fact, one of our goals is to incentivize advertisers to adopt better privacy practice

Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; in fact, one of our goals is to incentivize advertisers to adopt better privacy practices. There is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads"). What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one. What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future. In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them. So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.

apercu 1y ago
I visit HN often for exactly this sort of thinking.
bartread 1y ago
Paging YouTube devs. ^^^ This is how YouTube ads should work. I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence. At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?
- npteljes 1y ago
  Subscribe to Premium! All the Google ads go away in an instant. Very cheap for the mental peace you get. Combine with SponsorBlock for a greater effect.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    Yt premium has a built-in sponsor block now. They just recently added it.
    - npteljes 1y ago
      It kinda does, but it's not as neat as SponsorBlock is. SB fully automatically skips the sponsor segment, as soon as other SB users define where the it is, of course. With YTP's solution, you need to seek, and then click the white Skip button. I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
      - Workaccount2 1y ago
        Ah I see. I guess the upside is at least the yt premium solution works on all platforms. I mostly watch on my TV nowadays.
        npteljes 1y ago
        Yes, and that's a definite upside. Supposedly the ReVanced app on the phone has SponsorBlock integrated (or the functionality, at least), but I don't want to risk my account with a third party app. So, I take what I can get in the official one.
  - alex1138 1y ago
    I'll consider it once they stop their torrent of censorship and many other problems
    - npteljes 1y ago
      Why expect the other party to be perfect, or even good? It's a clear business proposal, I give $5, they let go of the ads. I can be critical whether or not I'm a subscriber, in fact, maybe even more so.
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  The big problem with contextual ads is that there's not always a useful context. What kinds of context-driven ads would you insert into a video by a guy who fixes old TVs in his garage? Or one who is building an automatic squirrel feeder run by a Commodore 64?
  - antiframe 1y ago
    Electronic components, tools, marker spaces, 3d printers and supplies, etc. And that's just thinking of the top of my head. With data you could build an effective portfolio of ads. More effective than personalized? Probably not given that with personalization you can target which price band of gear would maximize your return.
    - rafram 1y ago
      How do you know that people watching videos about a hobby are actually engaged in it themselves? They often aren’t. If they’re watching videos about a guy who does TV repairs for entertainment but their real passion is sewing, it makes more sense to show them sewing machines than electronic components.
  - vunderba 1y ago
    It's not an either/or problem. If context = sufficient then show contextual ads, else fallback to generic garbage. And fixing old TVs / C64? Could literally show ads for any retro game company, or digikey, or pcbway, etc etc.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  (satirical commment but this comes from real frustation of auto dubbing videos Automatically :sob: which pissed me off so much) (I have become a Hackernews shitposter and I like shitposting nowadays) Youtube Devs: Boss our customers are asking for better ads / less focus on AI related stuffs Youtube Execs: What do you mean? Do you mean we need to make videos auto dub and have it on every video available by default which can't be closed or being very hard to do so Youtube Devs: :-/ Youtube Execs: Oh yeah , btw Our share price just rose 15% after mentioning AI. We don't care about sustainability. I want to have a yacht larger than my neighbour and this AI crap is doing that shit. What do you mean we should listen to the consumers, how would that increase the stock prices. Meanwhile the stock market being the most evil hungry pretentious group of people a semi quote said by robert downey jr): As long as you can make a short term profit, I don't care. I want profits, sure it maybe a bubble but its profitable and Its not my money anyways, I am selling trading courses to young people who are feeling desperate for jobs in an economy which has abandoned them. And guess where the people are going when feeling abandoned/frustated... that's right youtube... and guess what sort of ads they are getting. Is this exploitatatitive, Yes, but is it legal, well maybe, we got bribery to make it legal. Oh yeah, also make the person believe in small issues to be really big issues and don't really give them an option on the one thing fucking them in their asses which is economy and the extreme gap between billionaires. This post is pure copium from my side but I want to let you know dear viewer, that when I was a child, I used to wonder how we used to have monarchy when I was studying first about democracy. Like, surely, we all know that this is superior form, we could reason about it and so on so why did we just adopt democracy so recently in terms of human history/civilization.. Like there are millions of people and some people in between, they could've changed the system... I felt as if I was questioning the people of that time, and I feel a lot of people feel that way in woman empowerment and what not too.. Are we not gonna be questioned by our future generations? Think about it, Grandpa where were you when this whole shit happened. I hope the answer is better than idk man just surviving, since that's what I am doing right now. People have become involuntary celibates the way the dating scene is so fucked and the dating standards so they might not even have grandkids. We can act tho. We can somewhat share this message or the spirit and be emboldened by it. By having less regrets while existence, fighting a bit. People have things hard but we need to get shit together if we want things better I suppose. lets just make noise tho and be happy. "The pigs are fools because they know too much" Dear reader, I want to end it in a positive note. I want to say that it isn't the system that is fucked. It is all of us which are fucked. Either for staying silent if someone does something wrong. Or silently doing the wrong thing for ulterior motives. Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness might be the most precious thing. Not even sure if I am on the right platform with this one given how I see so much AI AI AI bonanza here & well this is a YC funded orange website and what I did was another form of just some self pleasure of sorts, just a way to distress myself from the thing which frightens me while knowing I am doing my part. My point being that, I thought that we have this carefully crafted society yet its just a mask of elegance and the machine is barely working behind the cogs. Yet, we try to hide from this uncomfortable truth when in reality so much of it dictates all of us down to the ads which are pushed down our throats when we want to watch a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90's french hot hatch. Try to help somebody today please. Donate please. Volunteer please. Stop infighting between all of us, we have more common than differences, stop bullying, be there for someone. Just say thank you to your loved ones, I am going to do it just now. Idk man, we take shit for granted. even this mask of elegance of society is breaking which we were taking for granted.
tdb7893 1y ago
Personalized ads are more effective than non-personalized ads, to try to argue that personalized ads are ineffective is incorrect and the "without any proof" claim is absurd seeing the amount of specific data they collect on effectiveness measures. I used to work for ad tech companies and while that led me to hate them more than most people I'm not gonna say the data isn't their supporting their effectiveness. Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.
- dartharva 1y ago
  The "without any proof" part can be debunked even without the deep data, just looking at sales figures and conversion rates of personalized ads vs traditional "scatter-shot" approaches.
  - jqpabc123 1y ago
    traditional "scatter-shot" approaches. Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices? The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such. So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually. https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soars-reaching-us56-billion-2024/1905590 https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa... The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
    - hedora 1y ago
      There are smaller examples too. The Register was one such example the last time I checked. They sell space on articles and also run Sponsored Content features.
    - 1y ago
sanex 1y ago
I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?
- vachina 1y ago
  True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.
- harvey9 1y ago
  I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - fijiaarone 1y ago
    I don’t know what an example is.
  - ranit 1y ago
    The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.
    - harvey9 1y ago
      It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.
onionisafruit 1y ago
Do I recall correctly that this is how early google ads worked? I had a blog back then that I decided to monetize (a mistake in hindsight, but I needed to learn somehow). I was never on the buying side, but my understanding of the process is that there were bids for ads to appear on my blog posts based on their content.
- DamonHD 1y ago
  For the Google AdSense slots I run I have attempted* to turn off ALL ad personalisation for ethical reasons, hoping that G reverts to purely contextual clues like in the GoodOldDays(TM) when my revenue from Google ads was >1000x higher also! *I am not convinced that AdSense is really doing this everywhere, in spite of the need to do so for (UK/EU) GDPR reasons etc once I have told it to.
dartharva 1y ago
All advertisers wouldn't be together converging on the tracking-based ad model if that were the case. It's being used because it's driving more CTR than the traditional way. Your browsing history gives a more reliable base to segment you based on buyer profiles (incl age groups, location, interests), figure out your "intent" and target ads based on it. If you were to, say, read a random "Top 10 cars with highest resale value" article, on its own without historical data it won't be of any use for targeting because they don't know if you're actually a potential buyer in the market or just some teenager passing their time. Showing you those ads will waste their $$ if it were the latter. This isn't in any way an endorsement of their intrusive advertising practices, by the way - I personally have been using ad blockers and aggressively taking every step possible to avoid all online advertisements for more than a decade. It's just to provide a perspective on why it's not so simple.
hermannj314 1y ago
Do you have data to back up this claim? The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc. I cant accept that the same people that are manipulating my thoughts and desires with algorithmically optimized content never once thought to run hypothesis test on performance of targeted ads based on browsing history. I feel like you are making a bold claim, am I misunderstanding?
- fao_ 1y ago
  It's very easy to forget to challenge your assumptions, and one of those assumptions is "more data = always good"
  - awalsh128 1y ago
    I don't think they are necessarily saying that. The data driven aspect is to connect users actually wanting or interested in something. The measure of this is the conversion rate, which is where the user actually clicks on the ad. You can also connect these with purchases from the ad buyer. The data driven piece is all the variables involved in developing functions that maximize this. At that point it is basically data science.
- logifail 1y ago
  > The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc [...] We'll see that and raise you: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
  - labcomputer 1y ago
    Ok, I'll call and raise you the same quote! If I can cut my company's ad spend by an order of magnitude and still get the same sales... you really expect me to believe I won't get a fat bonus next year? Really?
rogerallen 1y ago
They could at least fall back to "context sensitive" ads like you suggest. Also, don't try to make me feel guilty for having an "ad blocker". I don't specifically block ads, instead I have a "tracking me without my consent blocker".
elnerd 1y ago
You are actually more likely to buy a car just after you have bought a car than the 10 years you did not need to buy a car. Maybe not cars, but I’ve heard this argument for kitchen appliances. If you for some reason return the item you just bought, you may buy what you get ads for. Maybe you regret you did not get the premium one, especially when they shove it in your face afterwards…
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Appliances, sure, because having bought a new blender I might be tempted to look at replacing that old toaster as well. I'm clearly in an appliance-buying mood, and if I'm not, maybe I can be persuaded in that direction. Cars? People who just bought a car are generally upside-down, and will not be looking to trade or buy another anytime soon.
- mcv 1y ago
  I feel like I'm far too eager to accept whatever I bought, and reluctant to return it. Maybe I should play their game and return more stuff when it's not quite perfect.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    I think accepting what you get and not obsessing over maximizing your satisfaction is a more internally peaceful way to live. Maybe get rid of the stuff you still stew over a year later, though.
marcinzm 1y ago
Ah yes. The classic internet “tens of thousands of experts and hundreds of billion in spend are all wrong and I know better” argument.
hedora 1y ago
Traditionally, these are called display ads. They require more effort on the part of the site that produced the content, but are much more lucrative for that site. Since most of the internet has been low-effort algorithmic slop for the last twenty years, tracking ads are more popular. They let low quality sites “steal” audience impressions from higher quality sites by displaying ads to people that happened to visit both sites. I think personalized ads / algorithmic targeting (and even collecting the datasets that enable it) should be banned.
- andy81 1y ago
  There's no reason that contextual ads couldn't be automated at scale. It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.
oytis 1y ago
It's literally how ads were done before the era of social media. Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough
- labcomputer 1y ago
  > Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough No, that was just the public justification so the public wouldn't think they're so creepy. The actual reason is that they work better. There's an old saying in the ad biz: "I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half." The point of personalized ads is to cut the wasted half.
ktosobcy 1y ago
Old but possibly relevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dangerous-does-internet-advertising-120000254.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dangerous-does-internet-adver... at any rate - not only context aware ads would be better privacy-wise but also probably would be way more lightweight…
ashu1461 1y ago
Retargeting ads also add value, it helps in reinforcement in a targeted way. It can be thought of a good way of branding on a cohort of customers who would be interested in your product. Just the definition of interest is something which is skewed.
npteljes 1y ago
Not much is "wrong" with targeted ads from an advertiser perspective - the ROI is more than 2× times higher, compared to non-targeted ads: https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-ads-more-than-twice-as-valuable-twice-as-effective-as-non-targeted-online-ads https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-a... And this number is produced even with the edge case you brought up! Targeting is just that good. Advertising is also not just product advertising, as in, "we would like to purchase this exact product". Advertising spaces are also contested, so, if one brand doesn't buy it, maybe a competitor will. Advertising also increases mindshare - you might not buy another new car of course, but people are still influenced by what they see. Brands are also bolstering their image with ads, regardless if you particularly buy or not. They are associating situations, lifestyles, emotions with their brand. What I'm trying to get at is incentive. The incentive is huge, and measurable, from the advertiser standpoint. And so, we will never get rid of targeted ads, unless we legislate, and enforce.
labcomputer 1y ago
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one. So... this intuition is wrong. Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased. Anyone who has ever worked in retail analytics will tell you this. Advertisers want to minimize their ad spend, so they always try to sell you first on the product which you have the highest propensity to buy. That's why they want personalized ads. The ROI is astronomically higher than for contextual ads. (That's why the DMA's prohibition on Facebook's pay-or-consent model, and HN's general cheerleading of it, is such a joke... and that's before you even get into the adverse selection problem of people willing to pay to avoid ads) There are plenty of greedy people in business. Rest assured: If cost of personalized grew to the point that ROI dropped below contextual ads, advertisers would switch to contextual ads in a heartbeat. They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.
- eichin 1y ago
  So... what's the flaw in the data gathering that leads analytics people to believe this? I got a ludicrous amount of real estate advertising over the first year after I bought my house which was when my "whew, glad I never have to do that again" feelings were strongest. Is it just that they extrapolate from consumables? (About the only time I'm in the market for "another one of those" is if the first one was so low quality that I returned instead of putting up with it - or if I sampled a few things to see which one was good and then need enough more to finish the project.) Not claiming that the ads don't have some influence, but they pretty much can't result in another sale...
  - wtallis 1y ago
    I think the advertising industry has a very long tradition of relying on and trusting bad data if it's the only data they have. As long as everyone plays along and believes that Nielsen ratings or circulation numbers or click counts are accurate, you can have a more or less functional market for advertising spots. And there's obviously demand for more detailed data, as long as advertisers can believe that it is accurate and can make their ads more effective. When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car), everyone involved has a vested interest in believing that the analytics must be right in some fashion. Doing otherwise would mean taking on a big risk, straying from the herd with a different advertising strategy that's guaranteed to take the blame for any drop in sales in the near future.
motbus3 1y ago
I guess all you said is correct but there is one important point. Data has being systematically being gathered and analysed to have an individual profile of your behaviour and needs without people understanding. It is not about knowing how much people needs to buy dog biscuits from people searching for dogs, but knowing that John Doe is 33 years, has 2 dogs, votes to democratic party, has chronic gastritis and commented on the internet that he does not agree with current presidential policies. The level of identification and tracking possible today is scary even across devices.
Animats 1y ago
> Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you In practice, that's most of them. Privacy Badger by itself is an OK ad blocker. Also, you can easily tell Privacy Badger to block sites. Privacy Badger warns you that blocking certain domains, such as Google Tag Manager (otherwise known as Google Backdoor Hostile Javascript Injector) will break some sites. In practice, this seems not to be a problem. I've had Google Tag Manager blocked for years.
glenstein 1y ago
>Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; That's what Unlock Origin is for. I don't know if they intended it this way, but seems like they complement each other quite well.
SilverElfin 1y ago
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. This is incorrect. It is often relevant, and it is reflected in financial performance of personalized ads. Companies aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it is wildly profitable and that’s because people respond more to ads that are aware of that “past”. You may not have access to the “proof” but they absolutely do.
- jazzyjackson 1y ago
  Yea bit of a selection bias. When I buy a vacuum cleaner and see a bunch of vacuum cleaner ads after the fact, you think, how can they be this dumb But you don't notice all the ad spend that goes into making you want more stuff in general, or all the ads that make you feel a little uglier on a subconscious level
  - jcul 1y ago
    I read something before about how if you've bought a vacuum cleaner, maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon. Not sure if there's ant truth in that. Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them...
    - lblume 1y ago
      Indeed. It might also be the case that the advertisements are tailored to the weaknesses of the product you bought, such that in case of a defect you might consciously or subconsciously remember the advertised vacuum cleaners with different properties.
    - wtallis 1y ago
      > maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon I find it hard to believe that return rates are high enough for this to be worth the trouble. It's much easier to believe that the advertisers are simply reacting to any signal for personalization, even if they received that signal too late. > Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them That serves the interests of Google or any other ad network; they don't really care about whether you eventually complete the purchase, as long as they get paid for your click. But the company actually selling vacuum cleaners should care.
johndhi 1y ago
I understand your argument, but why should we believe you, rather than advertisers spending millions of dollars, that this other form of ads is more effective than what they do currently? Your solution seems easier so it's hard to believe they're not doing it for some good reason.
- Xelbair 1y ago
  it's not about belief. It's about rights - my personal right to privacy trumps any business reason they think they have to track me. but to not be an ass - the issue is in accountability - how much of traffic to website is genuine? and no side wants to take on that risk so we end up with elaborate inefficient panopticon for advertisers profit.
jhanschoo 1y ago
I don't know how you think the ad market works. Advertisers have an idea who they want to sell to but they don't know their browsing habits. The ad industry collects data about you to see whether you are like the person particular advertisers want to sell to and what sites you visit. With this information it can display ads relevant to you on the sites you visit. You propose that ads shown should be conditioned just on the content of a website, but you are missing out on the fact that the content on any one website alone is a poor proxy for the type of customer that the advertiser is targeting.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  There seems like there would be a pretty simple fix for this: first, collect statistics relating demographics to websites. This can be done in an anonymized way. Next, publish this research and use Bayes' theorem to invert the relationship for serving ads.
  - rafram 1y ago
    Boss, it seems our audience is made up of 51% female 38.7-year-olds who live in Daviess County, Indiana. Let’s get our best team on this. We need to figure out what they’ll be interested in buying!
ceroxylon 1y ago
It has always annoyed me that a huge online mega-mart (that starts with the letter A) will advertise things in the same category as ones that have been recently bought, even though they are definitely not frequent purchases. It feels like the algorithm is saying "oh, they bought a mattress... they must really love mattresses and want more!", when much better ads could be suggested with the wealth of data they have on shopping habits.
gigatexal 1y ago
Yea I don’t mind ads for things I’m already looking for.
Vegenoid 1y ago
If contextual ads are more effective than personalized ads, then there is an enormous market waiting to have its lunch eaten by a contextual ad provider, which should be able to operate at a far lower cost than a personalized ad provider. That we don't see that happening at all is pretty strong evidence that personalized ads are more effective than contextual ads. I find it highly unsurprising that ads which are based on the history of a person are more effective than ones based only on their present. If someone was looking for a car last week, odds are that they are still looking for a car.
thisislife2 1y ago
> Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies? This generates a lot of false positives too - if I have bought something and I see an ad about it, I may still click at it out of curiosity but without any intention to purchase it. (And rarely has an online ad or copy induced me to purchase something again that I just bought). So Ad networks do have an incentive to keep showing me ads that I have clicked, whether it would convert into sales or not, because they make money from these clicks. I think that's why "personalisation" matter to the online ad industry - not because it increases conversion and makes more money for the advertisers, but because it does increase revenue for the advertisement platform.
- asdff 1y ago
  I'm always surprised people even click ads.
  - f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
    [dead]
  - thisislife2 1y ago
    I am the kind who does a lot of research before purchasing anything - so if I am buying something (or have bought it recently) it will be on my mind for some time and an ad related to it will arouse my curiosity, though (I like to believe) I am rarely swayed by them.
zer00eyz 1y ago
> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already It's something you do only once every 3-8 years. Targeting you, who just bought, wrongly, is better spend than targeting me, who isn't interested at all... A good marketing team has a pretty sophisticated reporting pipeline. A bad one is doing a lot of misattribution. > the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future Its a good way to build a profile of a customer, and even mundane things can be connected together into interesting data conclusions... This was almost 15 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... The reality is this, your consumer behaviors can be VERY predictable. No one wants to know that their ghost in the machine baahhh's like a sheep following the herd.
claaams 1y ago
It's really (not) cool when I get personalized ads that imply my sexuality or medical conditions when I am sharing a twitch stream with colleagues or friends.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them. No we were slowly forced by Google to surrender to their algorithm that use tons of data on users. I wish it was still easy to just put an ad for car when people search « cheap car », but the reality is that they keep removing features, making things convoluted and on the other hand push hard for their automated algorithm.
midtake 1y ago
Your first mistake is assuming the average person is as reasonable as you are.
IncreasePosts 1y ago
If I was an auto dealer web site operator, I definitely wouldn't want another auto dealer advertising on my site, taking my potential business.
mcv 1y ago
The best example of context sensitive ads I've seen, is on the Penny Arcade webcomic. It's a comic about computer games, so most/all ads there are of interest to gamers. Not only that, but the ads are made by the comic creators in the style of the comic, and they're about games/products they love. It's not just an ad, but an endorsement. I would think that kind of ad is a lot more effective than an authentically selected ad based on your browsing history.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  They still do both (e.g. I got a Mint Mobile AdSense ad above the comic) so it may be worthwhile enough to add on top but not effective enough to justify more effective targeted advertisements.
drnick1 1y ago
I personally don't want to see ads at all, be it on websites, Youtube, or anywhere else. I only use uBlock with a very restrictive policy (block ALL third party content), and also block a very large number of malware domains (Hagezi's Ultimate blacklist) at the DNS level. I don't see think I have seen a single ad in years, unless it's a sponsored segment in a YT video or similar.
- pasc1878 1y ago
  So how do the sites you use keep running? They need to have money to run.
  - f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
    [dead]
nine_k 1y ago
Frankly, to me it's the other way around, I don't care too much about all that tracking (even though I routinely block most of it), but I do care about the cost of having ads on the page. The cost of my attention, first of all. Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful? Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611) And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click. Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
esperent 1y ago
> Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads. Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on. This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.
Anon1096 1y ago
It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argument is all well and good, but to say they're less effective than contextual ads is ridiculous. Some of the commentariate here honestly thinks they've stumbled on something ad tech and marketing companies have never thought of, or worse that there is some grand conspiracy to cover it all up. Meanwhile the people who actually work in ad tech know that there are armies of data scientists poring over every facet they can to get any 1% improvement possible. If contextual ads were actually better Google and Meta et al would instantly switch to it. But they're not.
SergeAx 1y ago
Actually, the "he looked for a couch a week ago, let's show him all the couch ads we have" is still the best strategy in terms of CPI/CPC. And also a pretty cheap one. This is why they are doing it, not because they are dumb. It may enrage some, but what would they do, quit browsing the Internet?

apercu 1y ago

I visit HN often for exactly this sort of thinking.

bartread 1y ago

Paging YouTube devs. ^^^ This is how YouTube ads should work. I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence. At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?

npteljes 1y ago
Subscribe to Premium! All the Google ads go away in an instant. Very cheap for the mental peace you get. Combine with SponsorBlock for a greater effect.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  Yt premium has a built-in sponsor block now. They just recently added it.
  - npteljes 1y ago
    It kinda does, but it's not as neat as SponsorBlock is. SB fully automatically skips the sponsor segment, as soon as other SB users define where the it is, of course. With YTP's solution, you need to seek, and then click the white Skip button. I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
    - Workaccount2 1y ago
      Ah I see. I guess the upside is at least the yt premium solution works on all platforms. I mostly watch on my TV nowadays.
      - npteljes 1y ago
        Yes, and that's a definite upside. Supposedly the ReVanced app on the phone has SponsorBlock integrated (or the functionality, at least), but I don't want to risk my account with a third party app. So, I take what I can get in the official one.
- alex1138 1y ago
  I'll consider it once they stop their torrent of censorship and many other problems
  - npteljes 1y ago
    Why expect the other party to be perfect, or even good? It's a clear business proposal, I give $5, they let go of the ads. I can be critical whether or not I'm a subscriber, in fact, maybe even more so.
CamperBob2 1y ago
The big problem with contextual ads is that there's not always a useful context. What kinds of context-driven ads would you insert into a video by a guy who fixes old TVs in his garage? Or one who is building an automatic squirrel feeder run by a Commodore 64?
- antiframe 1y ago
  Electronic components, tools, marker spaces, 3d printers and supplies, etc. And that's just thinking of the top of my head. With data you could build an effective portfolio of ads. More effective than personalized? Probably not given that with personalization you can target which price band of gear would maximize your return.
  - rafram 1y ago
    How do you know that people watching videos about a hobby are actually engaged in it themselves? They often aren’t. If they’re watching videos about a guy who does TV repairs for entertainment but their real passion is sewing, it makes more sense to show them sewing machines than electronic components.
- vunderba 1y ago
  It's not an either/or problem. If context = sufficient then show contextual ads, else fallback to generic garbage. And fixing old TVs / C64? Could literally show ads for any retro game company, or digikey, or pcbway, etc etc.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
(satirical commment but this comes from real frustation of auto dubbing videos Automatically :sob: which pissed me off so much) (I have become a Hackernews shitposter and I like shitposting nowadays) Youtube Devs: Boss our customers are asking for better ads / less focus on AI related stuffs Youtube Execs: What do you mean? Do you mean we need to make videos auto dub and have it on every video available by default which can't be closed or being very hard to do so Youtube Devs: :-/ Youtube Execs: Oh yeah , btw Our share price just rose 15% after mentioning AI. We don't care about sustainability. I want to have a yacht larger than my neighbour and this AI crap is doing that shit. What do you mean we should listen to the consumers, how would that increase the stock prices. Meanwhile the stock market being the most evil hungry pretentious group of people a semi quote said by robert downey jr): As long as you can make a short term profit, I don't care. I want profits, sure it maybe a bubble but its profitable and Its not my money anyways, I am selling trading courses to young people who are feeling desperate for jobs in an economy which has abandoned them. And guess where the people are going when feeling abandoned/frustated... that's right youtube... and guess what sort of ads they are getting. Is this exploitatatitive, Yes, but is it legal, well maybe, we got bribery to make it legal. Oh yeah, also make the person believe in small issues to be really big issues and don't really give them an option on the one thing fucking them in their asses which is economy and the extreme gap between billionaires. This post is pure copium from my side but I want to let you know dear viewer, that when I was a child, I used to wonder how we used to have monarchy when I was studying first about democracy. Like, surely, we all know that this is superior form, we could reason about it and so on so why did we just adopt democracy so recently in terms of human history/civilization.. Like there are millions of people and some people in between, they could've changed the system... I felt as if I was questioning the people of that time, and I feel a lot of people feel that way in woman empowerment and what not too.. Are we not gonna be questioned by our future generations? Think about it, Grandpa where were you when this whole shit happened. I hope the answer is better than idk man just surviving, since that's what I am doing right now. People have become involuntary celibates the way the dating scene is so fucked and the dating standards so they might not even have grandkids. We can act tho. We can somewhat share this message or the spirit and be emboldened by it. By having less regrets while existence, fighting a bit. People have things hard but we need to get shit together if we want things better I suppose. lets just make noise tho and be happy. "The pigs are fools because they know too much" Dear reader, I want to end it in a positive note. I want to say that it isn't the system that is fucked. It is all of us which are fucked. Either for staying silent if someone does something wrong. Or silently doing the wrong thing for ulterior motives. Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness might be the most precious thing. Not even sure if I am on the right platform with this one given how I see so much AI AI AI bonanza here & well this is a YC funded orange website and what I did was another form of just some self pleasure of sorts, just a way to distress myself from the thing which frightens me while knowing I am doing my part. My point being that, I thought that we have this carefully crafted society yet its just a mask of elegance and the machine is barely working behind the cogs. Yet, we try to hide from this uncomfortable truth when in reality so much of it dictates all of us down to the ads which are pushed down our throats when we want to watch a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90's french hot hatch. Try to help somebody today please. Donate please. Volunteer please. Stop infighting between all of us, we have more common than differences, stop bullying, be there for someone. Just say thank you to your loved ones, I am going to do it just now. Idk man, we take shit for granted. even this mask of elegance of society is breaking which we were taking for granted.

tdb7893 1y ago

Personalized ads are more effective than non-personalized ads, to try to argue that personalized ads are ineffective is incorrect and the "without any proof" claim is absurd seeing the amount of specific data they collect on effectiveness measures. I used to work for ad tech companies and while that led me to hate them more than most people I'm not gonna say the data isn't their supporting their effectiveness. Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.

dartharva 1y ago
The "without any proof" part can be debunked even without the deep data, just looking at sales figures and conversion rates of personalized ads vs traditional "scatter-shot" approaches.
- jqpabc123 1y ago
  traditional "scatter-shot" approaches. Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices? The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such. So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually. https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soars-reaching-us56-billion-2024/1905590 https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa... The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
  - hedora 1y ago
    There are smaller examples too. The Register was one such example the last time I checked. They sell space on articles and also run Sponsored Content features.
  - 1y ago

sanex 1y ago

I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?

vachina 1y ago
True, also considering the hosting costs of that app (probably also on GCP or AWS), and the payment processing fee.
harvey9 1y ago
I ask friends and neighbours for recommendations for this kind of thing. Given you know the industry, what made you search online in this case?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- fijiaarone 1y ago
  I don’t know what an example is.
- ranit 1y ago
  The person you are asking doesn’t say that they looked and found the service through ads. They say that the cleaning companies spent 35% on marketing. And therefore everyone that uses these services pays 35% more as a result. Not only customers that find the service through ads.
  - harvey9 1y ago
    It really does read like they booked through a booking intermediary although the advert part is less clear. In either case, I prefer a personal recommendation if I can get one and we both gain by avoiding the intermediary fee.

onionisafruit 1y ago

Do I recall correctly that this is how early google ads worked? I had a blog back then that I decided to monetize (a mistake in hindsight, but I needed to learn somehow). I was never on the buying side, but my understanding of the process is that there were bids for ads to appear on my blog posts based on their content.

DamonHD 1y ago
For the Google AdSense slots I run I have attempted* to turn off ALL ad personalisation for ethical reasons, hoping that G reverts to purely contextual clues like in the GoodOldDays(TM) when my revenue from Google ads was >1000x higher also! *I am not convinced that AdSense is really doing this everywhere, in spite of the need to do so for (UK/EU) GDPR reasons etc once I have told it to.

dartharva 1y ago

All advertisers wouldn't be together converging on the tracking-based ad model if that were the case. It's being used because it's driving more CTR than the traditional way. Your browsing history gives a more reliable base to segment you based on buyer profiles (incl age groups, location, interests), figure out your "intent" and target ads based on it. If you were to, say, read a random "Top 10 cars with highest resale value" article, on its own without historical data it won't be of any use for targeting because they don't know if you're actually a potential buyer in the market or just some teenager passing their time. Showing you those ads will waste their $$ if it were the latter. This isn't in any way an endorsement of their intrusive advertising practices, by the way - I personally have been using ad blockers and aggressively taking every step possible to avoid all online advertisements for more than a decade. It's just to provide a perspective on why it's not so simple.

hermannj314 1y ago

Do you have data to back up this claim? The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc. I cant accept that the same people that are manipulating my thoughts and desires with algorithmically optimized content never once thought to run hypothesis test on performance of targeted ads based on browsing history. I feel like you are making a bold claim, am I misunderstanding?

fao_ 1y ago
It's very easy to forget to challenge your assumptions, and one of those assumptions is "more data = always good"
- awalsh128 1y ago
  I don't think they are necessarily saying that. The data driven aspect is to connect users actually wanting or interested in something. The measure of this is the conversion rate, which is where the user actually clicks on the ad. You can also connect these with purchases from the ad buyer. The data driven piece is all the variables involved in developing functions that maximize this. At that point it is basically data science.
logifail 1y ago
> The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc [...] We'll see that and raise you: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
- labcomputer 1y ago
  Ok, I'll call and raise you the same quote! If I can cut my company's ad spend by an order of magnitude and still get the same sales... you really expect me to believe I won't get a fat bonus next year? Really?

rogerallen 1y ago

They could at least fall back to "context sensitive" ads like you suggest. Also, don't try to make me feel guilty for having an "ad blocker". I don't specifically block ads, instead I have a "tracking me without my consent blocker".

elnerd 1y ago

You are actually more likely to buy a car just after you have bought a car than the 10 years you did not need to buy a car. Maybe not cars, but I’ve heard this argument for kitchen appliances. If you for some reason return the item you just bought, you may buy what you get ads for. Maybe you regret you did not get the premium one, especially when they shove it in your face afterwards…

CamperBob2 1y ago
Appliances, sure, because having bought a new blender I might be tempted to look at replacing that old toaster as well. I'm clearly in an appliance-buying mood, and if I'm not, maybe I can be persuaded in that direction. Cars? People who just bought a car are generally upside-down, and will not be looking to trade or buy another anytime soon.
mcv 1y ago
I feel like I'm far too eager to accept whatever I bought, and reluctant to return it. Maybe I should play their game and return more stuff when it's not quite perfect.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  I think accepting what you get and not obsessing over maximizing your satisfaction is a more internally peaceful way to live. Maybe get rid of the stuff you still stew over a year later, though.

marcinzm 1y ago

Ah yes. The classic internet “tens of thousands of experts and hundreds of billion in spend are all wrong and I know better” argument.

hedora 1y ago

Traditionally, these are called display ads. They require more effort on the part of the site that produced the content, but are much more lucrative for that site. Since most of the internet has been low-effort algorithmic slop for the last twenty years, tracking ads are more popular. They let low quality sites “steal” audience impressions from higher quality sites by displaying ads to people that happened to visit both sites. I think personalized ads / algorithmic targeting (and even collecting the datasets that enable it) should be banned.

andy81 1y ago
There's no reason that contextual ads couldn't be automated at scale. It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.

oytis 1y ago

It's literally how ads were done before the era of social media. Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough

labcomputer 1y ago
> Then someone came up with idea that people are annoyed with ads because they are not personalised enough No, that was just the public justification so the public wouldn't think they're so creepy. The actual reason is that they work better. There's an old saying in the ad biz: "I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half." The point of personalized ads is to cut the wasted half.

ktosobcy 1y ago

Old but possibly relevant: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dangerous-does-internet-advertising-120000254.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dangerous-does-internet-adver... at any rate - not only context aware ads would be better privacy-wise but also probably would be way more lightweight…

ashu1461 1y ago

Retargeting ads also add value, it helps in reinforcement in a targeted way. It can be thought of a good way of branding on a cohort of customers who would be interested in your product. Just the definition of interest is something which is skewed.

npteljes 1y ago

Not much is "wrong" with targeted ads from an advertiser perspective - the ROI is more than 2× times higher, compared to non-targeted ads: https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-ads-more-than-twice-as-valuable-twice-as-effective-as-non-targeted-online-ads https://thenai.org/press/study-finds-behaviorally-targeted-a... And this number is produced even with the edge case you brought up! Targeting is just that good. Advertising is also not just product advertising, as in, "we would like to purchase this exact product". Advertising spaces are also contested, so, if one brand doesn't buy it, maybe a competitor will. Advertising also increases mindshare - you might not buy another new car of course, but people are still influenced by what they see. Brands are also bolstering their image with ads, regardless if you particularly buy or not. They are associating situations, lifestyles, emotions with their brand. What I'm trying to get at is incentive. The incentive is huge, and measurable, from the advertiser standpoint. And so, we will never get rid of targeted ads, unless we legislate, and enforce.

labcomputer 1y ago

> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one. So... this intuition is wrong. Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased. Anyone who has ever worked in retail analytics will tell you this. Advertisers want to minimize their ad spend, so they always try to sell you first on the product which you have the highest propensity to buy. That's why they want personalized ads. The ROI is astronomically higher than for contextual ads. (That's why the DMA's prohibition on Facebook's pay-or-consent model, and HN's general cheerleading of it, is such a joke... and that's before you even get into the adverse selection problem of people willing to pay to avoid ads) There are plenty of greedy people in business. Rest assured: If cost of personalized grew to the point that ROI dropped below contextual ads, advertisers would switch to contextual ads in a heartbeat. They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.

eichin 1y ago
So... what's the flaw in the data gathering that leads analytics people to believe this? I got a ludicrous amount of real estate advertising over the first year after I bought my house which was when my "whew, glad I never have to do that again" feelings were strongest. Is it just that they extrapolate from consumables? (About the only time I'm in the market for "another one of those" is if the first one was so low quality that I returned instead of putting up with it - or if I sampled a few things to see which one was good and then need enough more to finish the project.) Not claiming that the ads don't have some influence, but they pretty much can't result in another sale...
- wtallis 1y ago
  I think the advertising industry has a very long tradition of relying on and trusting bad data if it's the only data they have. As long as everyone plays along and believes that Nielsen ratings or circulation numbers or click counts are accurate, you can have a more or less functional market for advertising spots. And there's obviously demand for more detailed data, as long as advertisers can believe that it is accurate and can make their ads more effective. When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car), everyone involved has a vested interest in believing that the analytics must be right in some fashion. Doing otherwise would mean taking on a big risk, straying from the herd with a different advertising strategy that's guaranteed to take the blame for any drop in sales in the near future.

motbus3 1y ago

I guess all you said is correct but there is one important point. Data has being systematically being gathered and analysed to have an individual profile of your behaviour and needs without people understanding. It is not about knowing how much people needs to buy dog biscuits from people searching for dogs, but knowing that John Doe is 33 years, has 2 dogs, votes to democratic party, has chronic gastritis and commented on the internet that he does not agree with current presidential policies. The level of identification and tracking possible today is scary even across devices.

Animats 1y ago

> Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you In practice, that's most of them. Privacy Badger by itself is an OK ad blocker. Also, you can easily tell Privacy Badger to block sites. Privacy Badger warns you that blocking certain domains, such as Google Tag Manager (otherwise known as Google Backdoor Hostile Javascript Injector) will break some sites. In practice, this seems not to be a problem. I've had Google Tag Manager blocked for years.

glenstein 1y ago

>Privacy Badger doesn’t block ads unless they happen to be tracking you; That's what Unlock Origin is for. I don't know if they intended it this way, but seems like they complement each other quite well.

SilverElfin 1y ago

> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. This is incorrect. It is often relevant, and it is reflected in financial performance of personalized ads. Companies aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it is wildly profitable and that’s because people respond more to ads that are aware of that “past”. You may not have access to the “proof” but they absolutely do.

jazzyjackson 1y ago
Yea bit of a selection bias. When I buy a vacuum cleaner and see a bunch of vacuum cleaner ads after the fact, you think, how can they be this dumb But you don't notice all the ad spend that goes into making you want more stuff in general, or all the ads that make you feel a little uglier on a subconscious level
- jcul 1y ago
  I read something before about how if you've bought a vacuum cleaner, maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon. Not sure if there's ant truth in that. Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them...
  - lblume 1y ago
    Indeed. It might also be the case that the advertisements are tailored to the weaknesses of the product you bought, such that in case of a defect you might consciously or subconsciously remember the advertised vacuum cleaners with different properties.
  - wtallis 1y ago
    > maybe there is an issue and you return it, so you are still more likely than a random person in purchasing one again soon I find it hard to believe that return rates are high enough for this to be worth the trouble. It's much easier to believe that the advertisers are simply reacting to any signal for personalization, even if they received that signal too late. > Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them That serves the interests of Google or any other ad network; they don't really care about whether you eventually complete the purchase, as long as they get paid for your click. But the company actually selling vacuum cleaners should care.

johndhi 1y ago

I understand your argument, but why should we believe you, rather than advertisers spending millions of dollars, that this other form of ads is more effective than what they do currently? Your solution seems easier so it's hard to believe they're not doing it for some good reason.

Xelbair 1y ago
it's not about belief. It's about rights - my personal right to privacy trumps any business reason they think they have to track me. but to not be an ass - the issue is in accountability - how much of traffic to website is genuine? and no side wants to take on that risk so we end up with elaborate inefficient panopticon for advertisers profit.

jhanschoo 1y ago

I don't know how you think the ad market works. Advertisers have an idea who they want to sell to but they don't know their browsing habits. The ad industry collects data about you to see whether you are like the person particular advertisers want to sell to and what sites you visit. With this information it can display ads relevant to you on the sites you visit. You propose that ads shown should be conditioned just on the content of a website, but you are missing out on the fact that the content on any one website alone is a poor proxy for the type of customer that the advertiser is targeting.

whatshisface 1y ago
There seems like there would be a pretty simple fix for this: first, collect statistics relating demographics to websites. This can be done in an anonymized way. Next, publish this research and use Bayes' theorem to invert the relationship for serving ads.
- rafram 1y ago
  Boss, it seems our audience is made up of 51% female 38.7-year-olds who live in Daviess County, Indiana. Let’s get our best team on this. We need to figure out what they’ll be interested in buying!

ceroxylon 1y ago

It has always annoyed me that a huge online mega-mart (that starts with the letter A) will advertise things in the same category as ones that have been recently bought, even though they are definitely not frequent purchases. It feels like the algorithm is saying "oh, they bought a mattress... they must really love mattresses and want more!", when much better ads could be suggested with the wealth of data they have on shopping habits.

gigatexal 1y ago

Yea I don’t mind ads for things I’m already looking for.

Vegenoid 1y ago

If contextual ads are more effective than personalized ads, then there is an enormous market waiting to have its lunch eaten by a contextual ad provider, which should be able to operate at a far lower cost than a personalized ad provider. That we don't see that happening at all is pretty strong evidence that personalized ads are more effective than contextual ads. I find it highly unsurprising that ads which are based on the history of a person are more effective than ones based only on their present. If someone was looking for a car last week, odds are that they are still looking for a car.

thisislife2 1y ago

> Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies? This generates a lot of false positives too - if I have bought something and I see an ad about it, I may still click at it out of curiosity but without any intention to purchase it. (And rarely has an online ad or copy induced me to purchase something again that I just bought). So Ad networks do have an incentive to keep showing me ads that I have clicked, whether it would convert into sales or not, because they make money from these clicks. I think that's why "personalisation" matter to the online ad industry - not because it increases conversion and makes more money for the advertisers, but because it does increase revenue for the advertisement platform.

asdff 1y ago
I'm always surprised people even click ads.
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
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- thisislife2 1y ago
  I am the kind who does a lot of research before purchasing anything - so if I am buying something (or have bought it recently) it will be on my mind for some time and an ad related to it will arouse my curiosity, though (I like to believe) I am rarely swayed by them.

zer00eyz 1y ago

> What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already It's something you do only once every 3-8 years. Targeting you, who just bought, wrongly, is better spend than targeting me, who isn't interested at all... A good marketing team has a pretty sophisticated reporting pipeline. A bad one is doing a lot of misattribution. > the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future Its a good way to build a profile of a customer, and even mundane things can be connected together into interesting data conclusions... This was almost 15 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ... The reality is this, your consumer behaviors can be VERY predictable. No one wants to know that their ghost in the machine baahhh's like a sheep following the herd.

claaams 1y ago

It's really (not) cool when I get personalized ads that imply my sexuality or medical conditions when I am sharing a twitch stream with colleagues or friends.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them. No we were slowly forced by Google to surrender to their algorithm that use tons of data on users. I wish it was still easy to just put an ad for car when people search « cheap car », but the reality is that they keep removing features, making things convoluted and on the other hand push hard for their automated algorithm.

midtake 1y ago

Your first mistake is assuming the average person is as reasonable as you are.

IncreasePosts 1y ago

If I was an auto dealer web site operator, I definitely wouldn't want another auto dealer advertising on my site, taking my potential business.

mcv 1y ago

The best example of context sensitive ads I've seen, is on the Penny Arcade webcomic. It's a comic about computer games, so most/all ads there are of interest to gamers. Not only that, but the ads are made by the comic creators in the style of the comic, and they're about games/products they love. It's not just an ad, but an endorsement. I would think that kind of ad is a lot more effective than an authentically selected ad based on your browsing history.

zamadatix 1y ago
They still do both (e.g. I got a Mint Mobile AdSense ad above the comic) so it may be worthwhile enough to add on top but not effective enough to justify more effective targeted advertisements.

drnick1 1y ago

I personally don't want to see ads at all, be it on websites, Youtube, or anywhere else. I only use uBlock with a very restrictive policy (block ALL third party content), and also block a very large number of malware domains (Hagezi's Ultimate blacklist) at the DNS level. I don't see think I have seen a single ad in years, unless it's a sponsored segment in a YT video or similar.

pasc1878 1y ago
So how do the sites you use keep running? They need to have money to run.
- f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
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nine_k 1y ago

Frankly, to me it's the other way around, I don't care too much about all that tracking (even though I routinely block most of it), but I do care about the cost of having ads on the page. The cost of my attention, first of all. Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful? Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611) And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click. Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.

esperent 1y ago

> Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads. Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on. This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.

Anon1096 1y ago

It's honestly so embarrassing and damning for HN that drivel like this is getting upvoted. To argue that personalized ads are bad for some kind of privacy argument is all well and good, but to say they're less effective than contextual ads is ridiculous. Some of the commentariate here honestly thinks they've stumbled on something ad tech and marketing companies have never thought of, or worse that there is some grand conspiracy to cover it all up. Meanwhile the people who actually work in ad tech know that there are armies of data scientists poring over every facet they can to get any 1% improvement possible. If contextual ads were actually better Google and Meta et al would instantly switch to it. But they're not.

SergeAx 1y ago

Actually, the "he looked for a couch a week ago, let's show him all the couch ads we have" is still the best strategy in terms of CPI/CPC. And also a pretty cheap one. This is why they are doing it, not because they are dumb. It may enrage some, but what would they do, quit browsing the Internet?