[porridgeraisin]

I'm on the other side of the divide from you.

However, mine and many other folks' position is not preferring untargeted intrusive annoying ads over targeted intrusive annoying ads. It's preferring almost zero ads with maybe the rare, non intrusive easily avoidable ad on certain appropriate websites[1]. That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.

[1] a shopping website having a _single_ banner on the home page announcing an ongoing sale for HP laptops is OK. However, if I search for lenovo laptops and I see a HP laptop as the first "sponsored" result....(Looking at you amazon).

And about tracking, I absolutely don't want my librarian running to my travel agent telling him I recently looked up france travel guides. The digital equivalent of this happens daily to everybody. It's simply a no-no for me, there can never be a justification for it.

The fact is that if you ban these two classes of practices, the whole of ad tech comes crashing down. I hope everyday for this to happen.

[LunaSea]

> That is why we aggressively use ad blockers and go to great lengths to avoid the status quo.

And so you're paying for the content you're reading as well?

[troupo]

Ad-supported does not mean "tacking your every movement and collecting all your private data across the entirety of the internet throughout your entire adult life, and selling that data to the highest bidder"

[LunaSea]

Usual the news publishers don't sell user data because they have so little of it.

However external data providers are used to retarget specific audience segments on said publisher's users.

If you want to sell ad impressions at reasonable rates, you'll need to provide audience segment targeting, otherwise the ad performance will be too low for brands to continue buying it at previous rates.

[troupo]

1. Those extraordinary claims need some extraordinary evidence

In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816

2. Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.

Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.

[LunaSea]

> In a comment elsewhere in the discussion: accuracy of targeting is worse than random sampling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719816

I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed. Among the reasons, they don't differentiate desktop and mobile traffic which is a massive measurement problem. They also use Nielsen DAR which is in itself a heuristic method of determining what age and gender a user is and thus is not a great pick as an oracle.

The study also does not mention click and bounce rates which are good proxies for targeting success.

Beyond the performance, the marketing and sales aspect of targeted advertising is also a strong selling point, no matter the performance.

> Ads have existed for as long as commerce existed. Google became a trillion dollar ad behemoth before it started collected everyone's data by simply offering contextual ads.

No, it didn't.

> Literally nothing in the ads business requires you to collect and sell so much of user data that it would even make Stasi pause and re-think.

It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance (lower click rate, higher bounce rates, lower conversion rates).

Example: If 1/100 people read hockey-related content and out of those people, 1/100 pages read is about hockey, it means that you're reaching about 1/10000 page views.

Now if you do implement user tracking, you're available inventory is 1/100 page views.

[troupo]

> I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed.

Show me a non-flawed study that shows you need vast amounts of user data and tracking, for each user, throughout their lifetime to deliver ads

> No, it didn't.

Yes, yes it did. The skyrocketing revenue is attributable to increased internet usage across the globe, and Google outright owning a large chunk of it.

> It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> Example:

Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent, and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?

Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?

(It's quite telling how people defending targeted advertising never address the elephant in the room)

[porridgeraisin]

Nope, if they are so unscrupulously willing to employ dark patterns, I can get pretty competitive :-)

[LunaSea]

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[porridgeraisin]

???

im not talking about piracy here - I pay for multiple streaming services and yt music provided the resulting experience is ad free.

But ads on your news/shopping website? Regardless of if I pay or not I'm gonna get upsells and ads. That simply does not fly. In any case, intrusive ads are a no-no. If your platform utilizes intrusive ads, I have no remorse for any loss incurred on your part.

[LunaSea]

> But ads on your news/shopping website?

"What, paying for MY news? How dare they"

[porridgeraisin]

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