[youngtaff]

Who says personalised ads are better performing?

The companies who make the real money out of ads are ad tech vendors, with publishers often picking up the scraps

It’s not suprising that people who’ve worked in personalised ads often promote them as the only way to fund the internet

[logifail]

> Who says personalised ads are better performing?

I deliberately made my comment more generic, this isn't just about ads.

Any senior manager worth his or her salt knows that staying on the right side of the law is significantly more important than supporting any dubious "product improvement" which is on the wrong side of the law.

[jefftk]

> Who says personalised ads are better performing?

https://twitter.com/garjoh_canuck/status/1318989360407236609 summarizes the studies on this, and this comment [1] gives additional context.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dFgfQTo4DRZG5t8Ap/can-ads-be...

[youngtaff]

Garrett's thread and the studies in it are often rolled out as evidence that personalised ads perform better and so losing the ability to harvest data that supports personalised ads would be bad for the web

Looking how the data was collected in the studies and where it comes from then Google, FB and other adtech vendors feature strongly (and they can't be considered neutral sources)

In the ad market there are three participants - advertiser, publishers, ad networks.

The last group keep telling us we need them for a health internet, while being completely opaque but making billions creaming off their cut of advertising revenue (there don't seem to be any reliable figures on how much they actually take but an old Guardian study found that sometimes they were getting less than 10% of the revenue the advertiser actually spent - Guardian have brought ad sales in house since)

Alternatives such as category based advertising are often not discussed other than to say 'if personal ads go then the spend is likely to be re-directed towards category based ads'

Even Google while claiming personalised ads are better seems to rely on category based ads for the revenue from search ads (see the CMA report)

IME working alongside various publishers it's often that case that directly sold category based ads are way more profitable for the publishers

Given thread like https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1582434737813348352 (and others) I'm deeply skeptical of claims ad tech companies make