Kaye
kaye@cathode.church
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So tailoring ads to a broad audience obviously does work. You run ads for gamepads on videogame websites. You run ads for expensive wine in Yacht Owners Monthly.
But the massive surveillance-/ad-tech scheme, which collects ten thousand data points about every device and tries to match them to the perfect product, that basically doesn't do anything. It shows you ads for toilet seats because you've bought a toilet seat. It shows me ads for learning German because my device language is set to English and my IP geolocates to Germany. Neither of these campaigns will result in a sale.
Like. Contrast that with the FurAffinity model. "You pay the people who run this website to display ads. You know what sorts of people will see them because of what our website is like." That's far cheaper, far easier, and far less intrusive than the modern ad-tech approach. And the results it yields are probably *better.*
However, a third of the First World's economy is based on the assumption that this Rube Goldberg machine of espionage and real-time bidding actually does do something, so nobody wants to run the numbers.
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David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
david_chisnall@infosec.exchangeShow content
Others have pointed out the data, and my personal experience correlates strongly with this. I used to click on Google AdWords.
Back when they were first rolled out, they were innovative:
- They were placed based on the content of the page. If people interested in X buy Y, show ads for Y on a page about X. They properly captured the temporal aspect: I am looking for information about a specific thing, now is a good time to show me relevant ads. The fact I was reading about the thing yesterday tells you very little about whether an ad today makes sense.
- They were not intrusive. They were not trying to grab my attention, which meant that they got past poster blindness: I would read them or ignore the, just like other content on the page, whereas banner ads at the time were just completely filtered out of my conscious awareness.
- They were plain text. You have one or two sentences to tell me something relevant about your product.
A load of companies managed to use their one sentence to tell me something relevant to my interest and make me click on the link.
Marketeers hated it because there was no need for their massive design budgets. And it hit the same problem a lot of big tech has: the business model was based around growth, but they were selling a finite number of ad spaces and there’s a limit to the amount of advertising people can see that’s effective, so you need some mechanism to make it seem more complicated. Oh, and there was also the arbitrage problem: for a lot of products (with big budgets) there were only a handful of places that had a good return. If you’re selling cars, it’s pretty obvious that ads in a car magazine will probably be useful. But there’s no need for an intermediary between a car company and a car magazine.
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buherator
buherator
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