Imagine how easy it would be to sell ads on reddit, the users self select topics. If I subscribed to r/koreancosmetics and r/makeup, do you really need ML to figure out which ads to show?
There's an old saying goes something like this "if you go to the car dealership, and all they have are station wagons, they're gonna sell you a station wagon". The ads you see on Reddit say much more about who is willing to advertise with them than anything about you. And so if you're seeing low-value ads, it's because they can't sell any high-value ones.
As somewhat of an aside, I've used google ads before (small money) and found the experience to be awful. Very confusing interface and I am almost positive I was doing things wrong. I've also used Facebook and found it much better. It's weird because that's google's cash cow. Does everyone who spend real money just go through a personal broker or something or does everyone use that interface?
I suspect the real answer is "because ads on Reddit are less than worthless" - so you get ads trying to sell you ways to poo.
I suspect Google is in a position of power so it is to their interest to make it hard to use their ad interface (or no reason to make it easier) because they don't want you to really work out exactly how useless the ads may be.
> What drives ad spend?
Momentum, likely, but I'm not in the business so I can't really talk to the values.
Yes everybody goes through something like a broker. I run a small agency that manages google ads for small to medium businesses and I frequently get contacted by people who tried to do it themselves and got terrible results.
Yeah, but what about scraping the entirety of a user's comment history to drive it through the algorithm to advertise to the things they aren't explicitly showing interest in?