[alkonaut]

I'm hoping for a revival of dumb ads. That large sites such as major newspapers will have ads like they had in the 90:s - internal ad sales departments spending long hours making ad contracts with advertisers who will trust and/or audit the traffic.

[noneeeed]

Likewise. I've always been curious as to just how significant an impact all this behavioural ad-serving actually has on the impact of their marketing budget. We assume that things like AdSense must provide better ROI than simple dumb placement of ads, but I'd love to know if that is actually true over the long term, and if so just how much better it is. For example, it might work well in the short term for certain things, but at the expense of long-term broarder brand awareness perhaps.

However I suspect it would be fiendishly difficult to work out the effect over anything other than the immediate short term (i.e. impression to click to sale).

If anyone knows of some good experimental work on this I'd love to read it.

[yowlingcat]

I'd love to read some good experimental work on it as well. Off the top of my head, I can guess that there's some benefit to retargeting ads up to a point -- if you can show an ad sequence over time, there's probably an argument to be made that the spaced repetition is more effective than just showing the same ad over and over again, for certain kinds of ads. Then again, that gets back to ad design in and of itself -- a clever campaign could go viral and/or engage in a way an A/B optimized campaign with a poor concept probably never will. With something that's part art/game theory/design and part data, I'm really curious as to how you could even design a reasonably lossless experiment to accomplish this.

[lapnitnelav]

This isn't just about trusting the traffic, it's about being able to optimize which creative is the most effective, what's the optimal threshold of #ads served for a user to convert - and conversely, being able to not overspend on someone who's clearly not interested.

The other part of that is those kinds of ads (dumb ads as you say) are going to be mostly useful for branding. Which is fine when you are Apple or Coke, but if you're a smaller player, you'd rather make sure your ads only get in front of the right eyeballs.

[alkonaut]

Yeah - What I want is effectively having the effect that no small site can have ads and no small business will advertise. It would also likely mean the death of more than half the sites and content on the internet, as well as the loss of millions of jobs in the ad industry and at those sites. And I still hope it happens.

[lapnitnelav]

Well actually I think it's going to be different.

SMBs will only leverage Google, Facebook and other big platforms because I believe they'll have the ability to keep being relevant given their "walled-garden" model despite GDPR-like legal framework.

Every small publisher, aka 99% of them will likely collapse one way or another.

As counter intuitive as it might seem, while this would hurt their bottom line, Google and FB would benefit the most from this.

I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(

[alkonaut]

> I'd rather see indie ad-networks with an emphasis on anonymity -no PII / control -delete profiles who works with publishers in a fair trade like model. But I'm not naive :(

That would be great. I think browsers could push this. A simple standard data structure that people volonteer to provide for themselves. If I want "relevant ads" I populate it thuroughly and honestly. If I don't want that, I don't populate it at all, or even ask my browser to randomize it. But info used for targeting it should be info that the browser (i.e. user) provides and not info that the industry scrapes together.

Second: identity. I think step one must be making sure users can't be tracked or fingerprinted. Browser vendors need to make absolutely 100% sure that no font rendering or other fingerprinting can be used.

Obviously point #2 means that point #1 can't be too detailed, or can't be transferred verbatim every time. If you have narrow enough interests you can be fingerprinted.