Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kitsune_ 4381 days ago
I've said this before on here, but online advertising is incredibly dumb. If you consider all the info Google and Facebook have on me, it's a really sad state of affairs.

I bought a new bicycle and religiously researched this topic and consumed a ton of cycling videos. What ads do I see on YouTube? Cars. I don't have a driver's license.

I once bought a NI Maschine Midi Controller. YouTube then showed me video ads for the NI Maschine Midi Controller for over a year after the purchase. Great business for Google, not so much for Native Instruments.

During a vacation in South Korea, I had logged into Facebook to post a picture. Facebook then showed me Korean ads in Hangul for over a month after my return. They have all the info on me, where I was born, what language I speak, where I live, where I work. Hilariously bad.

And so on.
2 comments
chupy 4381 days ago
Those three can be explained easily:

1.If you have never visited a car company's website then it's just that Google categorized your profile wrongly and only the car companies are bidding for you when it comes to show an ad. 2. Just a company wrongly retargeting converters (people who have bought a product) with the same product that they have bought. 3. In Real Time Bidding [1] for Facebook, their information about the user is very much lacking [2] so depending on the advertiser that bids you might get very bad ads.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding

[2] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads-api/rtb/#...

link
corin_ 4381 days ago
It's a game of averages - what you're doing is watching a blackjack game and saying "why on earth didn't you double down on that 18, the next card was a 3!"

Sure there's a lot of errors in advert targeting, but they don't need 100% accuracy to see results, and on a scale from "just chuck adverts at everyone, some will be relevant" to "let's have people manually look into every user to profile them and know exactly what to target them with" there has to be a point where it's not cost-effective to make things even more accurate.

link