[carl_sandland]

Why can't we use some sort of metadata tagging system instead? Isn't this what the person is indirectly trying to do: declare some simple tags, such as "US politics", but indirectly via a bunch of garbage fed into an auto-tagger?

[ajross]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but (1) we did once[1], because you're right that it seems like an obvious fit. But in practice (2) it got absolutely crushed in the market performance-wise by more sophisticated algorithms like Facebook's and Google's (Amazon plays in this world too, though they have an easier space to search). It turns out that the fundamental game in the ad world isn't serving ads that site administrators and content creators think their users want to see, it's figuring out what the users of that content actually want and showing them that instead.

And indeed, that cuts the site operator out of the loop, and forces them (if they want to make money from these ad algorithms) to design a site that will attract users with easily-intuited advertising needs. And the linked article doesn't have that.

[1] And still do in parallel niche markets like porn.

[dylan604]

It wasn't just the meta tags that were abused. People were adding text into invisible elements, or text as the same color as the background, etc. This was the precursor to SEO and ads really, and just people trying to get listed higher in search.

As soon as it can be gamed, it will be gamed. It's just the scammy nature of it all. Now that it's "AI" generated content, it will get to enshitified almost immediately on any system that is created

[bruce511]

We tried that. It just lead to sites adding a million meta words to gather as much advertising as possible.

But, as a thought exercise. Let's say you were selling ads directly to the business paying. Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

[kuschku]

> Which businesses do you suppose might be interested on a congressional apportionment calculator?

Political ads? Campaign ads?

Newspapers advertising that they've got the fastest election news?

People looking for an apportionment calculator are likely interested in a past or future election and interested in political topics. That's a lot of potential ads you could show.

[bruce511]

Cool, so sell to any one of those directly. I mean, the revenue from the site now must be terrible anyway.

So if there us the value you suggest, it should be an easy sell. Probably less work than he went to to tweak the site.

Then again, are people investigating vote targets undecided voters? And good luck getting media to advertise....

[kuschku]

Indeed, selling ads like this directly is the old school way of doing it.

But even on YouTube it's back nowadays, most YouTubers get their money from sponsorships which work just the same as old-school pre-internet ad placement.

[jonathankoren]

Temu.

But seriously, there are plenty of ads that are based on geo located IP. Then of course there’s the cookie (and cookie replacement) ads.

Complaining about site content is pretty bogus.