[Uplink]

I never understood why advertisers insist on giving me "relevant" ads. I find it better if the ads are diverse and all over the place, as I discover new things. The "relevant" ads are usually about stuff I just bought, so useless to me.

I find this site insightful in terms of discovering new things. It could be made into some sort of tumbler for ads. :)

[Klathmon]

You can opt out of the relevant add in all major networks. I know I did once, and it was so much worse. Most ads were for shit I absolutely would never care about. Weight loss systems, beauty products, child care products, quit smoking assistance systems, etc...

I know this is sacrilegious on HN, but I personally prefer targeted ads to that. I still think you and everyone else should be able to not have ads targeted if you don't want, and I'm all for alternative funding systems where you pay for content directly, but I'd much rather see ads for SaaS companies I may use and movies I'm interested in over that stuff.

[bluGill]

Because there are people who buy more than one of something.

Buy a widget - you might be purchasing for a company and will buy a the same widget next month for the next employee. If you advertise your widget to everybody 99.999% won't buy it, so that 99.9% that won't buy another widget is a much larger margin of those who will buy another. (the ad is about either keeping you a loyal customer or getting to to switch to a different brand). Most of us are more valuable as a possibly purchaser of more than one than as a potential customer of something new we didn't even know we needed.

[aeorgnoieang]

I read a related claim about this. People that just bought an, e.g. refrigerator, are much more likely than others to buy a second one soon as they're more likely to need a new refrigerator and even the small chance that the one they just bought doesn't work or isn't satisfactory means there's a much greater chance they'll need or want to buy a second one than that other people will want to buy one.

I could imagine buying a mattress would be an even better example.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Because there are people who buy more than one of something

The New York Times stopped behaviorally targeting in Europe without much consequence [1]. I don't think we can reject the hypothesis that adtech is largely a scam, with targeting being done more so adtech companies can "differentiate" themselves than for any benefit to publishers.

[1] https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...

[vkou]

> I never understood why advertisers insist on giving me "relevant" ads.

Because Honda doesn't want to pay Facebook $$$ to show Civic ads to a hippie that lives in a small commune and rides a home-built bicycle.

[c0vfefe]

Ironically a Civic would probably be high on that hippie's list of cars. What really would be folly is advertising an oversized lifted pickup truck.

[mcv]

I don't mind if they're actually relevant ads, but they rarely are. Quite regularly, they keep showing me the same irrelevant ad over and over and over again. The logic behind their ad selection completely eludes me.

Maybe I've blocked enough cookies that they actually know nothing about me? But I use plenty of Google services, and I'm generally logged in to my Google account by default.

Maybe the problem is that the things I'm interested in, are things that don't generally advertise much. Not on such broad generic advertising networks, at least.

[pb060]

Are they really relevant? According to advertisers I am in constant need of a slimmer wallet and a stair lift, while I'm rather happy with my current wallet, and my legs are still more or less ok.

[dwighttk]

nice legs... it'd be a shame if anything happened to them...

[c0vfefe]

The system is unconcerned with how useful the ads are to users. Ads exist to persuade potential customers to buy, not to provide utility to them. The "relevance" is for them, not you.

[ryandrake]

If I were given the choice between targeted ads and non-targeted ads (funny: no web site has ever offered me this choice), I would always choose the non-targeted ads. Since I disregard all ads anyway, the only difference is the targeted ones are served by sharing my information all over the place and the non-targeted ones aren’t. Therefore the non-targeted ones are better.

[overcast]

Where do you find this insistence? I haven't seen a single relevant ad in years!

[Uplink]

Thus the quotes around "relevant". I find the "relevant" ads to be so far off the mark that my head hurts.

[c0vfefe]

For all our worries about Big Data and privacy, Google et. al are apparently doing kind of a bad job at it. Seems like a one-hour conversation with a human would produce more relevant marketing insights than analyzing tens of thousands of data points does.