[neilpanchal]

I gave a try to Twitter's Ad platform recently. Mother of god, they've built a giant machine behind the curtains. It has terrible UX, but I could, if I wanted to, target a U.S. Military retiree that likes creole food, located in Boston, enjoys watching Golf and uses iPhone 11 Pro with an older iOS version 14. The profiling of users, and the ad-tech machinery is insane. There is a auto-bidding machine, detailed analytics, website tracking scripts, conversion metrics, the works. I had no idea. Imagine you build something amazing, but no one knows about it – how do you get that thing across people that actually want it? It is a hard problem and from my little experiment with their advertisement platform, it is miraculous. Surprisingly, I've not seen any article from mainstream newspapers that exposes what kind of a goliath Big Tech's ad platform is.

You ought to sign up and see it for yourself. Meta & Google's Business Platform is similar if not more powerful.

After this revelation, 8000 people entirely makes sense.

[dragonwriter]

> It has terrible UX, but I could target a U.S. Military retiree that likes creole food, located in Boston, enjoys watching Golf and uses iPhone 11 Pro with an older iOS version 14

So, it's got lots of categories you can target. But...what evidence or guarantees are there of accuracy of the targeting?

[neilpanchal]

There seems to be some misfiring because rate of likes isn't high (~1 like in 100 impressions), but based on the people that like the promoted post it is 100% without exception accurate. So, at the least, it is reaching the right people. I know because there are currently 500+ likes and I've visited every single profile and tried to engage with them. Audience is just developers.

I must say, it has been a very positive ad experience – receive compliments, 10% retweets, and had several long form conversations with strangers on Twitter messages. Really fun.