> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
Another one here. Vocal techno is a pain in my ears. There are few exceptions like in Bonzai Records classic tracks like “Let there be house.” or Emmanuel Top. These male voices are more aggressive and are helping to inject some additional energy into the songs, while female voices seem to drain it.
Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.
Fellow House/Techno listener. I am astonished that you can even use Spotify/Scrobbles etc. I always feel an outsider as the only way to listen to that genre is livesets, which i meticulously collect and download from various sources (youtube rips, soundcloud, artist releases) and play offline like its 1998. Any modern streaming plattforms are not suitable for that genre at all - you don't want to listen to 1min leadin/out anyways.
Was a subscriber for a while, but their streaming reliability on poor networks was really bad (also when transitioning from wi-fi to cellular and back) and they weren't keen on fixing it. Spotify works so much better.
I liked their playlists/radios, though and I miss them.
I gave up on them for psytrance. Used to be paying subscriber for many years, but their catalog never really got updated. Got tired of hearing the same tracks over and over.
Even iTunes genius was amazing - I shudder to think how much money I blew on $1 songs, but with subscription music there's now no incentive for them to have good discoverability - they get my money either way.
I would bet that you can train Pandora's algo to respect this preference by thumbing down every vocal techno track. The music genome annotators will have a boolean for vocals in the analysis. You'd likely start using recommendation strategies that use the annotations more than normal. Pandora is still the best for lean back listening.
Pandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.
However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.
The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).
Way back when I used Pandora I found similar behavior if I gave songs thumbs down. It would converge on a small selection of a few artists and their music. It was really good at some genres if I didn't thumbs up or down many songs.
I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.
1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)
2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.
3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".
4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".
Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.
5. "Clancy Brothers".
This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.
6. "Steeleye Span".
This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.
7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)
8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.
Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.
I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.
Maybe you found the secret sauce to Pandora by everyone I know that used Pandora extensively had OPs experience. Myself and my partner both stopped using it after years of paid subscriptions because of that problem
Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.
The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires
> However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.
Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.
In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.
(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)
Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"
We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.
yes. You are (or at least, were. c. late 2000's) Pandora's customer. They want to maximize engagement either to serve ads or to justify a subscription.
You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.
Have you tried brain.fm? It’s closer to the Lofi genre, has zero vocal which I really appreciate and no quick abrupt, distracting changes. It’s very rhythmic.
Soundcloud is still best for me - you follow artists and people who repost dj sets that you like. Pretty simple and still the standard in berlin afaik.
There's many auto generating dynamic ones. Like the Monday and Criday ones. Plus the DJ new AI thing and then the better stuff is often in all the human curated Spotify lists.
There's also a way on desktop to take an existing g playlist and "create similar" where it tries to make something similar too one of your already made playlists. You have a lot more control using this
If you long-press on it and choose View/Goto Episode/Show, are there any third-party apps listed as a way to watch it? If so, and you’re using any of those apps, then check each of their in-app wishlists for it as well; it’s possible that (unlike Netflix) they’re actually well integrated enough into the TV app to cause this. If not, in total seriousness, you could open an Apple Support case that might result in them asking permission to reset your watchlist database records cloud-side.
(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)
Nope. Doesn't work. It's a zombie. I have watched other movies like it, in the past, and I might watch it in the future, but I don't want to pirate it, and I don't want to pay $25 to watch it now.
Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...
One that was forced on something like one billion people, rather than just one, yeah.
There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.
I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.
Spotify was never a good product IMO and for techno it has always been obviously a bad product as many many songs and variants never make it to their platform.
Even YouTube music works better for me most of the time, but SoundCloud clearly takes the lead
The music industry associations around the world generally can’t force you to use their royalty system for your own music. So if you make an ai generated track they’re out of the loop completely. As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.
It's important that they pay the royalty to themselves because the royalty is a fraction of your subscription fee divided by the number of royalties paid. Paying one to themselves dilutes the others.
It's amazing how many people commenting on streaming royalties don't understand this fact, claiming for instance that s music treaming service X plays more per stream.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)
I've been using https://www.getsubwave.com lately and it's great, but it is unfortunately already pre-filtered to my music collection. Would be slick to connect to spotify or a streaming service though!
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Holy shit, I’m the exact opposite. I’m so sorry. I am the reason you have to listen to all that vocal trance.
Similar here: I occasionally listen to music on Youtube late in the evening, and always watch a math or physics video in the morning. Simple, but it appears impossible for Youtube.
Sure would be nice if we enforced Payola laws. It's hard to believe that at one point the US Government sought to regulate fairness on something as low-stakes as radio. Today corporations do much worse and our politicians mostly sit by and watch. Maybe a small fine.
Yes, just because an algorithm knows what someone wants doesn't mean the algorithm will give it to them.
In fact, the algorithm is there to make money by changing the choice a person would make otherwise - the subtlety I assume is figuring when someone will accept a "good enough" choice handed to them. But just limiting choice to what you want someone to make might be a simpler approach.
Google's real advertising proposition is they will sell you the audience of an expensive website on a cheaper website. Want to advertise on the New York Times? Why pay their high rates? Google tracks who visits the NYT and offers the advertiser the same audience when they visit Bob's hobby gardening website, which is considerably cheaper to advertise on. That's really why they want to track where you go. Understanding what you want is just a secondary aim to that, if they are interested in it at all, and I agree with the article that they are very poor indeed at it.
Hard to imagine all the combined various bob spend is really very cheaper than a single better placement. You have to imagine this also puts downward pressure on those nyt placement prices and upward pressure on bobs.
If there is such an unrealized margin why hasn’t it been eaten up by now? No one should be advertising on nyt at all if what you say is all thats going on.
You are forgetting that the big tech ad companies are cooking the numbers in other ways making them generally untrustworthy. Ask yourself deep down do you trust Meta or Google.
The New York Times doesn't have to bullshit because people want to use it, thus it's a more trustworthy advertising point.
Businesses don't want to pay for marketing that doesn't work and the simple answer is targeted ads work. Advertising to anyone that reads the New York Times, when a business can target people that are searching for a couple of key words relevant to the business' product? Even if it's the company's money and not my own, I'd rather spend it on something with a provable ROI, not just blindly blowing money showing ads to people that wouldn't or can't buy the product.
Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
My parents were frugal; we acquired most possessions second hand, and we learned to view all advertisements with suspicion. Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
> Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
There's a lot of question as to how much advertising is actually worth the cost, at least in terms of actual sales. I suspect that many companies could scale back their spending on marketing substantially and never notice any difference in sales.
Advertising does more than push sales though, it also manipulates consumer perspectives and our culture. It sets expectations. It tries to make you feel inadequate, insecure, and unfulfilled. It modifies how we act and the ways we express ourselves. It changes how we see ourselves and the world. Maybe that is what's really worth the money.
My brother worked for Proctor & Gamble, which is a company whose success is built entirely on the magical effect of advertising.
As part of his training he had to run an advertising campaign for a minor P&G shampoo brand. Training for a finance position, not a product management position! Why would you make somebody in finance handle marketing for a shampoo? Because they need to understand the fundamental mechanics that drive the business. There's no such thing as a good or a bad ad. The only thing that matters is that you flash the name of your product into peoples' primitive lizard brain over and over and over. Pantene, Pantene, Pantene, Pantene. People buy commodity products, and are willing to pay more, solely based on whether they recognize the name or not. Humans have no defense against this.
The Mere Recognition effect exists in pretty much all humans, yes--but it's completely possible to train a reflex of "if I recognize the brand name, it's the same product as the store brand next to it for $150% of the price." My family also did this when I was a kid.
I think this is right on the nose. Advertising as it exists today is not so much about inducing customers to buy your product, as it is propaganda to convince people that your product holds a natural place in society.
When you view ads through this lens, the number of ads for things that consumers do not even directly purchase — like prescription drugs, or oil - makes a lot more sense.
Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales
As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
I’m sure we can trust the folks whose whole business model is “we’re real good at convincing people to spend their money” when they say their product is a super effective tool that every business owner should spend money on. Right?
It's like that on YouTube today. Every single company that buys in-video advertisements ("sponsors") on YouTube has turned out to be a scam in one way or another. Every single one. The VPNs are probably the least bad, since they deliver the service as promised, they're just overselling how much you need the service, but at least it's not very expensive. Well that and the meal ingredient delivery, which is just overpriced.
Established Titles doesn't make you a lord. Honey doesn't save you money. Brilliant doesn't help you learn things. Betterhelp doesn't connect you with real therapists. I forgot the others.
If I get advertised something on youtube, I instantly assume it's not very good. I only use onshape because I was personally recommended it by a friend. It does the job, mostly
There's also manscaped. I just assume they are crap too since the rest are.
The VPN side - it feels more like a honeypot than anything else to me.
I'll sometimes use the VPN mode from Proton, but I wouldn't sign up for just a vpn - I simply assume they are selling my data the same as everyone else. The only way to convince me otherwise is an open-source non-profit vpn properly overnighted by the community.
We're talking about entertainment products. What do you think it would be like to be the only Star Trek fan in 80s Mongolia? I think it would be pretty sad. Yes, the show would still be the same, still be as good, but you have no one to share it with. They simply don't get it.
So even the most hardcore nerds adapt their tastes to what other people like. It's not so hard, because hey, there are other good TV shows, there's other reasonable entertainment. It's hard to say objectively that a Star Trek convention is better than a Mongolian Chess tournament anyway.
But when advertising comes into the picture... It's not that you necessarily think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the best thing ever. It's that you know everyone will be talking about it, everyone will be referencing it, so if you can find at least decently entertaining you should maybe prioritize getting into that over getting into Danish underground comics from the 90s.
I just don't buy things that have adverts I find annoying.
I did some web development work for an advertising guy about 20-odd years ago and he found my position on it baffling.
"But advertising works on everyone!" he cried, "everyone remembers their favourite adverts! Why do you buy oh for example the washing powder you buy?"
Well, I buy Persil, because it's what my mum buys, and I like how it smells. I tried other washing powders, but I didn't like how they smelled so much, and there are two brands I won't buy because they have annoying shouty adverts.
From a similar mindset: Some kinds of expensive promotional signals (like a smartphone showroom with wasted floor-space) become a bad sign, especially if the company/product already has wide brand-name recognition.
If the company can afford to throw money at Frivolous Thing X, the money has to come from somewhere, which implies it comes from consumers who aren't actually getting a good deal on the product or service.
> Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
One doesn't need to be frugal or come from such environment, its more about basic human decency and mental hygiene. You try to manipulate me to buy your product, normalize its existence etc? Ok will make sure to avoid that, there is a lot of competition. Too pushy and seeing it everywhere? it means you over-invested on marketing manipulation and product has probably seen some dramatic cost-cutting to make it all together still financially viable. In any case, customer lost.
uBlock origin with Firefox on internet, including (especially!!!) on phone. Ads simply don't exist in my world under normal circumstances, not on general web, nor on youtube. When something bad happens and I see internet or youtube without those protections, its properly nauseating and outright insulting to me.
But - I've seen people en masse already conditioned to accept this, they watch it all, some of them even take hints for their shopping habits. When questioned, they don't see anything wrong, don't care about manipulation. Sometimes I feel like an alien. Luckily my wife sees it the same, I'll go to great lengths to protect my young kids from this cancerous soul garbage. 'Better' parents from our circles see it similarly, for now at least.
The secret that most people in business don’t want to admit is that the vast majority of internet/media advertising is not worth the cost.
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
It's partly true, but only if no-one advertises. If I don't advertise but a competitor does, then I start to lose market share. So although the cost may not justify itself independently, in the face of my competitors' marketing budget, it does.
That reminds me of one of my idiosyncratic policy wishes: An enormous pigouvian tax on any advertising beyond a spreadsheet listing quantitative technical data about the product. Companies don't lose anything, since the relative spend and impact remains the same; consumers gain a lot of information and public funding, and lose daily aggravation.
Pigovian taxes were invented to compensate for externalities. Where's the externality here? You go to a website. The website owner says "watch this ad to access my content". It's a free agreement (or disagreement) between you and the website owner, nobody else is harmed.
Since advertising spending is largely zero-sum, additional spending on advertising may shift market share, but it does so without delivering new factual utility or consumer surplus. The fact that there's a pareto-superior equilibrium makes it a symmetric reciprocal externality: Robert H. Frank showed, in "Positional Externalities Cause Large and Preventable Welfare Losses" (2005) that positional arms races are shaped exactly like environmental pollution.
But, even if there's a better equilibrium, isn't loading a website crammed with obtrusive ads still a coasean bargain between two parties? Simon P. Anderson and Stephen Coate studied this question in "Market Provision of Broadcasting: A Welfare Analysis" (2005). They identified unpriced externalities like the common-pool attention tragedy, as has been raised in other comments here, and asymmetric information & hold-up, which increase transaction costs.
Divide advertising spend into two components: Informative specs, and persuasive/obtrusive spend. The margial external cost is the sum of profits foregone by rival businesses, and aggregate viewer nuisance. A pigouvian tax with an exemption threshold for factual spreadsheets and apunitive rate on expenditure above that (or visual intrusion metrics) both prices the cognitive nuisance imposed on readers, and collapses the positional arms race between rival firms; transforming the industry from a high-waste prisoner's dilemma to a low-cost, high-information pareto optimum.
Obviously, you still have to watch out for firms goodharting the spreadsheet metric, but that's both a partially solvable problem, and a much better situation than the current nash equilibrium.
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
Only a very small part of advertising is actually product promotion. Coca-cola spends $4 billion a year on ads, do you think it's because otherwise no one would know that coke exists?
It's true that advertising is a great way to promote a product, but its far from the only way. For many years now I've done what I can to cut all advertising out of my life and yet I still buy lots of things, including things I've never seen a single ad for.
Yes, but not because advertising lets people know about Coke. The people who still know about Coke would be the same after a year, I imagine.
The mechanism of how advertising works seems to be not that. I think repeatedly brand exposure does something to the brain and decision making that we don’t fully understand.
If you drink it now, would you stop? Would you forget that it exists even though it's on store shelves, in vending machines, and pushed at several restaurants? Who would stop?
Almost no-one can honestly answer this for themselves. I think the truth is likely: 'no, I'd still order a coke at McDonald's, I'd still pick a coke up from a vending machine if I'm thirsty. But if I'm buying a takeaway sandwich, I might not also get the drink. Or if I'm in the supermarket, I might just skip that aisle.'
But it's the dirty little secret of most advertising: there's no voluntary feedback to prove (consistently, objectively) how effective your $$ are being spent.
The last thing a marketing company or media provider wants to admit is that any of their services are underperforming, or worse, turning off buyers.
This isn't true in the general sense, for new products with no distribution or customer awareness it's very important to advertise how else will anyone know about it.
Paid promotion in publications is a much more gentler way to advertise though compared to modern internet advertising. Back in the day I'd buy computer magazines - basically the whole point of which was to make me aware of new products. But the articles were at least somewhat at arm's length and not pure ad copy.
Yeah you can still buy subscriptions to substacks where people recommend you products to buy in certain categories, the entire Semianalysis thing is substack about which GPU/AI Accelerator to buy.
This doesn't in the slightest replace ads though. Before modern internet advertising we had advertising in whatever else had your attention. Ads were meant as we way to simplify and ease distribution.
It's a horrible business in terms of user experience but it's purpose isn't user experience it's meant for businesses to be able to streamline their outreach for much cheaper than the alternatives, imagine cold calls, emails, door knocks, door to door sales has died for this very reason.
I am not trying to explain away the issues and societal problems but they have value of companies otherwise they wouldn't exist. However much people would like to pretend CEOs and founders aren't completely retared.
For initial distribution spikes Ads are the best possible solution, very expensive yes, but if your goal is growth Ads are the most efficient solution since they almost linearly convert spending into visibility in turn producing growth.
Most new products don’t get advertised. That happens later after they’ve made some initial sales. Those initial sales often happen from just placing it on some shelf space, real or virtual, where relevant consumers are liable to find it.
Word of mouth is one of the the oldest ways and it can still be very useful. It tends to work best when your product is actually any good though. If you have a product that really is amazing you won't have to manipulate people into paying for it, and you won't be able to stop people from telling others about how great it is.
the name matters, chess.com= automatically associates with something central about chess. (dot com)
lich-ess can be read as lich-chess or leeches, both leave repulsive associations,
effectively sub-conscious anti-marketing.
Absolutely untrue by any metrics or semblance of study. People overestimate how unsusceptible they are to marketing. Marketing doesn't only work if you see an ad and click on it. It's after seeing hundreds of ads, that you start internally building a perception of a brand as whatever they market as (expensive, value oriented, fun, serious, luxurious, splurge material, etc.) Then the next time, maybe months after you've seen any such ad, you need to buy an expensive, splurge type gift for someone. If you remember the brand then, the marketing has worked.
That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online
My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
> Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand
Expanding on this.
"Wanna go eat somewhere? Like McDonald's or something?" -> McDonald's is suggested offhandedly[1], but that's only because it's already somewhere in the back of the person's mind, and it's already associated with "eating". It's only "already" there because the person is aware of it. And they're aware of it for whatever reason (one of which could be advertising, but who knows!).
The endgame for advertising is when people become blind to ads, either because they become used to them, or because they hate them so much they "ignore" them (or so they tell themselves). So in both those situations they completely block out the "ad" part of it, and "I saw an ad about a thing that..." becomes "Wasn't there a thing that...?").
[1]: Maybe even defensively, like "if we don't find anything better (or we're not in the mood for anything in particular) there's always this option as a last resort".
The truth today is that almost all consumer products produced today is crap we don’t need. It’s almost literally manufactured landfill, since that’s where most of it will end up.
If I've bought a BBQ and hamburger-adjacent equipment, I probably prefer my hamburgers home-made.
I might view the ad after 7 PM, as that's when I get home from work, and still decide to go there the next day during my commute.
Engaging with burger-related activity might also mean that I run a competing joint, so advertising to me is pointless (unless you want me to buy that one time just to check my competition).
That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.
And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.
If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.
As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.
People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.
>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way
For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.
Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.
Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already
I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
But isn't relevance just measured as purchasing the product? That is, someone who can be convinced by advertising to by a ford or a Toyota by which shows the next ad would have equal relevance, even if the Toyota is the vehicle they would most prefer?
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm still not sure this overcomes the marketing budged differences between entities like "AI Slop Co" vs. "Independent Artist" or "Ford" vs. "Independent Mechanic". There's also the fact that the heaviest advertisers are often the brands I'm going to be least interested in regardless of any other factors[1]. Yes, you can get ad relevance to some local maximum where I do see some stuff I'd actually buy, but optimality is forever out of reach because the products I really want to know about probably spend almost nothing on advertising or have direct competition from an entity like Microsoft that will pour $millions into their ad spend.
[1] VPNs are a perfect example here. I would never use NordVPN because they advertise on every square inch of YouTube. This suggests to me that they're either charging too much for what they offer or they're getting money from their actual customers and the users are simply the inventory they sell to those customers.
Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
We are doing this all wrong. I don't need to be "targeted". There's things I want to buy. Get to know me. Learn what I need. Then, do a JOIN in your database and show me the best options for me.
That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?
Targeting was super easy back in the days, when it was done based on where the ad appeared. Putting video game ads into a video game magazine and not diaper ads was kind of a no-brainer, but on the net I had to suffer through diaper ads on a video game site.
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
I agree with part of this. I don't know what Instagram is doing, but their ads are remarkably well targeted. The rest of the internet needs to do whatever they are doing.
> I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?
Whatever Meta is doing on Instagram is next level advertising.
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
The few times I ever used Instagram, it knew me where I went to university (a different country) and then recommended I take a cybersecurity course. That was rather scary because it shouldn't have that information.
Despite hardly posting or commenting, Instagram is the only place I've seen relevant and interesting ads. Like scary good advertising. My wife has had the same experience, she was blown away that the ads are actually relevant where everywhere else, including Facebook which has the same or more info, acts as dumb as you can possibly be. I've heard others say the same. I don't know why they are so much better at ads or literally everyone else sucks so hard that just doing as would be expected appears exceptional. The addendum to this is that in the last few months this fell apart for her account and now it's turned irrelevant.
A vegetarian can still buy French fries from McDonalds. An ads are not necessarily about you but about the people in your life too. Think parents getting served gaming ads. They might not want the consoles but their kids will surely appreciate a PS6 for Christmas. Point is, a sale was made. Who ends up using the product isn't that important for the ad imo.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
I wouldn't pin them into a particular demographic. I have simply met people over the years who actually see ads as a form of entertainment, almost like pre-entertainment before the real entertainment. If someone isn't adept at recognizing the patterns of manipulation baked into advertising (something I've always been far too aware of), it makes sense they could like ads. After all, ads aren't intended to make the viewer want to turn them off, even if they have that effect on many people anyway.
One of my best friends had banner ads and YouTube ads on his laptop, and there was a day where I finally had to say something about this. I asked him if he ever considered installing an ad blocker and explained how easy it is. He surprised me by saying "Meh, they don't really bother me. I kinda like some of them." As mind-bending as this is from my own perspective, this mindset does seem to exist.
I can also count with more than one finger how many girls I've gone on a movie date with who said "I dunno, I like it" after I made fun of the stupid Coca-Cola commercial or whatever before the trailers. Looking back at this, I probably was being a bit pompous. I'm pretty sure they liked the commercials for the vibes they picked up from their perceived positivity.
Imagine a person who's IQ is a dozen or so points to the left of the curve, those folks like a lot of really really dumb repetitive stuff. I worked with one of these folks in an overnight shift, he had seniority having worked there for many years. He listened to the same comedy show every single shift and laughed at the same jokes at the same spots every single time. I attempted to put on some other comedy thing once, he got pretty angry and demanded that we put on "his" show. Thankfully I was only on with him twice a week, but still I felt like I was going insane.
This sounds more like autism or other neurodivergent thing than unintelligence. I also have a preferred working soundtrack and get pretty annoyed if someone decides to switch it up on me when I'm working! In fact isn't unintelligence fundamentally the inability to pattern recognize well or easily? That he has a "his" show would counter against it...
This is a very uncharitable take IMO that veers into (I’m assuming unintentional) snobbery. Some people just have a routine or whatever that helps them get through the workday. My taste gets a lot simpler when I’m at work for sure. I really enjoy putting on shows I’ve already watched a dozen times, regardless of quality.
Sometimes? Look at IQ distribution, by definition half of folks have it lower. Now I wouldn't use the term 'dumb' if you want any sort of dialog, its not kind (like the opposite would be smart arsehole or similar), ie 'lower intelligence' is derogatory enough.
One thing I've realized - I simply can't grok many of theirs' decisions, viewpoints, values. Its often quite selfish view but rarely just that. And just pure facts rarely pierce the thick veil or version of reality they create for themselves to feel comfortable in this crazy world. Or maybe thats the thing - I don't mind feeling uncomfortable in this world, seeing uncomfortable truths, picking up lesser of evils instead if simple black & white polarity, or the pinnacle - actually changing my opinion on things as I learn more about it.
Or in other words - can't talk to them about anything deeper, nor do I grok them beyond surface layer. But as you say its fine, and also its quite easy to create a life where you just don't meet them, apart from odd situations like car repairs or home reconstruction.
I don't think people like the intrusion. I will say I do like very targeted ads that actually show me the solution to a problem or something fun I'd enjoy. I just don't want them covering the entire internet with garbage, which is the state we're in right now.
Sometimes it's hard to believe how different people perceive things.
I'll never forget the last time I visited the Dell website, it had some popup dialogue constantly jump into view on the side and then disappear again after two seconds or so. It was so infuriatingly distracting to me, meanwhile someone else sitting next to me didn't even notice it before I pointed it out. Which I guess explains why that same person often has trouble finding a seemingly obvious button on screen - it could jump across the screen and some might still not see it.
I find it especially funny that when I point my eyes directly at the banner (because it's the subject of the question) my brain still filters it out by ignoring it.
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs":
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
This is especially true when you know how to avoid ads otherwise and are confronted with what must be the default ads for the majority of regular users.
It's like a smell. Some are pleasant, some are fascinating, and some are totally nasty, but I don't willingly plug my nose everywhere I go like a psycho.
What would the world be like without smells? This is a serious question I'm asking. How recalcitrant do you really have to be to get offended by all ads and on the principle of the matter?
Not sure why I still have the Google app on my phone, used to like their live score system, until when from the 3 soccer teams I said I follow they started showing me on the lockscreen/live scores from teams and championships that I never in my life followed anywhere. So, the Google app sometimes sucks me in with various articles, and of course when you click on them, you'ren ot in safari with an ad blocker, but the pure google experience, and somehow I get the feeling that almost all websites out there are impossible to use or to get any information from, as they are 90% ads. You get overlays, audo playing videos, more overlays, more banners, it's impossible to use any website that is a bit popular without any adblocker.
I stopped having cable television in 2001 because I lived in a place where it wasn't available. I moved to a new place in 2002 and went completely pirate media (shitty quality episodes of the Simpsons and such). I went to streaming when that became available, but the point is that I stopped seeing television ads a long time ago.
I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.
I haven’t used an ad blocker in years, and, I don’t know, my brain just sort of learnt to ignore ads. Not “promoted” stuff that looks like regular items in the feeds (e.g. Google ads in search results). But just random banners on the website - I don’t even register them consciously. Every now and then I do notice curiosities like “the meatbag bought a mattress let’s offer him 100 other mattresses”, but otherwise I feel like I am totally blind to ad banners.
I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.
I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.
Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.
Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.
When you eventually need insurance who will you buy it from? One of those companies that you know are insurance companies has a better chance of getting it than some little unknown company. Nobody is immune to propaganda.
BBC doesn’t show ads in the UK (bbc.co.uk), but the international edition (bbc.com) does. The site looks quite different, and automatically redirects based on geolocation.
(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)
It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
I've asked people at Amazon on the recommendation algorithm side about this, since it comes up so often in discussions.
Their answer is that, surprisingly, it is a good heuristic. If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
Is the posterior probability that you'll buy a mattress again shortly after buying one, a small chance? Yes, undoubtedly. But is it smaller than the prior probability of a random person who hasn't bought any mattress at all recently, suddenly being on the market for a mattress? Apparently not.
Weird things can happen with joint probabilities when both sides of the condition are very unlikely. Sort of like how your chance of having some rare cancer after testing positive on a ~99% accurate cancer screening test is still quite tiny.
People always have said this from when I was in ad tech over a decade ago and to be honest, I think it's much more mundane: a delay in the ad tech data pipeline. If you have delayed intent signal, or you have delayed suppression, or even if some conversion gets dropped in the pipeline, you're going to get this effect. People talked about this a lot but almost all the focus on recent purchaser lists was on suppression. So I'm just going to go with the boring explanation: data pipeline error.
> If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.
It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
> It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
Links that take you to a malicious site are not the only security reason. Ads are often used as vehicles for malicious payloads, some execute when you click on them and some are 0-click.
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
> one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations
You raise a good point. I am similar. I am much more influenced by an advert that is somewhat artistic. Plus, I notice that size and scale really matters. Thinking about the same advert: One is a tiny graphic on your phone, the other is a two meter tall version on your subway platform. The second one is much higher impact.
I mean if you get useful ads that don't feel like a waste of time, I'm sure you'd have a more positive view of ads, not sure the takeaway is normal people like ads, but i'm sure there's something to be said about well timed and targeted ads.
Like the ads I get on instagram, I actually don't mind because they are show me clothing consistent with my taste in clothes or appliance/utilties I'd find useful. Can't say I've ever seen a useful ad on twitter/X or Tiktok.
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
Honestly, I've found it's easier and cheaper to just pay for content; instead of having my content peppered with annoying ads and then buying junk I don't want to support the content.
It actually shocks me how often technology in general does the exact wrong thing to what I want. A couple off the top of my head.
* I purchase something and all the recommended products become the thing I just purchased for the next month.
* I do an operation in 3D modeling software that can be applied in 2 directions, it always chooses to apply it in the direction that makes no sense.
* I get recommendations in my social media feeds for what to do in a certain city for 2 months after I already visited and returned home.
* I click on a link to a song, listen for 10 seconds and turn it off because its a genre I don't like, too bad, that is what the algorithm thinks I'm exclusively into now (related, right now I'm struggling with Tidal recommending Swedish language songs because a band I recently discovered is Swedish despite singing in English).
Maybe I don't notice when the computer gets it right most of the time, but it really feels like it gets it wrong more than it gets it right. It also feels like this continually gets worse, when software should be getting smarter at predicting what a user wants. Is it unreasonable to expect that my computer can see that I did the same operation on something twice in a row and that maybe it should prompt me to do it on the rest of the data in the same location?
Yup, it's weird to me that companies as big as Amazon haven't figured this out.
Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.
Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.
ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.
> But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
You might not be, but as a guy with easily a dozen cameras from half a dozen brands, we're absolutely out there, and I know plenty of other folks in my network who do too.
(Reason: I travel a lot, I live stream for a living, and my partner does social media.)
People in TV shows are paid (via the production company) because the TV broadcaster is paid, because it sells advertising during the show. Advertisers pay because the broadcaster can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they commission programmes that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
People in livestreaming are paid because their platform is paid, because it sells advertising during the livestreaming. Advertisers pay because the platform can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they support livestreamers that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
If your question is not the economics but the social aspect (why would someone watch livestreaming?), the answer is that either the livestreamer is doing something cool that people like watching -- and you can be as judgemental about that as you can be for TV shows ("they're watching Real Housewives / a guy speedrunning Super Mario Bros / HYROX championships ??!?!?"), and there is now also the live-service aspect, which you've experienced for decades in the form of talk radio with callers, and DJs taking live requests. Also, in the early days of the internet, there used to be forums that would host watch parties, so everyone watched the TV at the same time and commented in a thread to get the metacommentary and it built up a watching community. That is now integrated into the livestreaming, and the chat sidebar is visible to everyone watching, approximating a live audience, who can let their thoughts be known in a slightly more nuanced way than just cheering/booing/clapping.
Once you realize you are the product on Amazon's search page it makes a lot more sense. Over half the listings are paying amazon for higher placement into that search. It's long since stopped being a search experience that works for the shopper.
No, that makes no sense. Sure, my data is valuable for advertisers, but:
The washing machine advertiser doesn't want to to spend money to show me an ad for something I'm not going to buy, and even Amazon doesn't benefit because they get something out of each purchase, so they should want to show me stuff I want to buy too.
There's just nobody that benefits from bad ad selection.
If you buy one camera, you are likely a billion times more likely to buy another. And, you have the disposable income to be in the market.
>> there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines
You are not a whale, but you might be. Most people only buy one washing machine but a few people buy dozens (apartment managers and such). Such people, whales, sometimes buy one as test case. So ya, if you buy one then you are a strong maybe for one day buying many more.
Sometimes I wonder if it's about returns. "You bought one washing machine, but you might not like it and return it, so how about these others". Could even be that they're tracking sales only rather than sales minus returns, because returns take longer to come in so the metrics are harder to track.
The thing is for every 1 guy that just purchased it, the retargeting is getting 99 people who just looked at options and haven't purchased yet. So even if that 1% will never buy again in a short time, the whole cohort is still many times better than random non-retargeted people.
Amazon must make more money from camera brand ads than from selling camera accessories. Every time they push a camera to someone who already has one, they get paid for that, and the ad buyer can't easily verify. The person is flagged as liking cameras, after all.
The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?
Music lessons. There were multiple factors they shared, customer acquisition wasn't the only thing not working but that they brought it up at all is why it stood out. Indeed it is the kind of thing where referrals you would have thought would help, but also macro factors against. Competing against apps whether these guys are digital or not, anyone can start up a rival business at home esp if they have instruments already, and so forth.
I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.
you use adblocker. you're persona non grata to begin with. your purchases are not mapped back, that's why you keep seeing the stuff you just bought. for them, you are top of the funnel still. AdBlockers work! (20yrs in adtech)
for music, you're also irrelevant. you're old. music industry doesn't care about 25+ finding new music. they spend all their effort on keeping teenagers in a comfortable bubble to mine them for music purchases and shows. people under 25 spend pretty much all the money record labels make.
anyway, the system works and they do know everything about you. but your goals and desires are completely irrelevant to everyone involved money changing hands.
This. The industry does care as little as legally possible about the opinion of humans regarding advertisements. I do not entirely agree, but i understand this from their perspective.
Howver, i do not see why i should not act the exact same to the industry. From my perspective i absolutely hate online advertisements in each and every form. This is a feeling and not something i enforce or endorse to others. You do you concerning advertisements.
If it was legally possible for me to destroy all advertisements, i would. But it is not. I do however control my own infrastructure. I am as sure going to design it so that i am as little as possible bothered by advertisements. The goal of the advertisement industry is completely irrelevant to me.
the horrible performance of targeted ads in the op for both consumers and advertisers is why many advertisers are now going for connected tv, or native ads in market places (e.g you're shopping for detergent - then you see a sponsored listing for another detergent brand)
coz targeted ads as in op - only one party has benefited so far - people running the ad exchanges.
If there's anyone working for YouTube here, instead of the "I'm not interested" button I'd like a free text input where I can describe what exactly I don't like about a video.
What the author wants isn't for tech companies to know per more, but use what they know in per interest. Ads are shown for products you just bought because the algorithm is optimized to maximize conversion of clicks to purchases, not to please the buyer which is a subtle but important difference, and this is what this optimization looks like.
All those ads where paid by some companies, who were probably promised by some google ad salesperson the most focussed and personalized and relevant targeting.
Will they get a discount ?
Can the advertiser (as in "the company paying for the ad") get any of those signals ("we're paying for ads, but they're being shown to randos who are never going to by our products") ?
Or are the online ads so cheap that they don't care ?
This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying.
I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.
No, it's really difficult for 'them' to find out whether you actually purchased something. All the tracking stuff is on social media and the product browsing pages. But not on checkout. Shopping sites can't allow all that stuff there because of security and privacy issues. So big tech doesn't even know whether you bought something. They only know what you have seen. That's why they keep showing it.
You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.
You think of it as the corporate mind control machine. I think of it as "oh, I am looking for a new car and completely forgot Subaru is also making cars that fit my profile - I should test drive them as well".
That's not always good. If I am looking for a kind of product, and an ad recommends a possibly better product that I didn't know about, both sides benefit from it.
I think they theory is that you are more likely to have some sort of buyers remorse and return that toaster and buy a new one than a baseline person is to suddenly buy a toaster.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
that’s literalist what they know. it’s called retargeting and it’s the point of these ad systems, to track what people buy to understand how to link buying patterns to other info about people
If I buy a car, I get flushed with ads for cars. Really. Same for an area rug, a vacuum cleaner, and many other things I will never buy two in a row of.
Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?
Don't expect too much from ebay, even effin' google search in 2026 (and certainly 2027 too) cannot figure out I am deeply in french speaking part of Switzerland, and thus it may be better to serve me in french. They do have Swiss offices in Zurich mind you.
I keep my Firefox on mobile (with ublock origin) not logged into my google account. Every second search result since forever I need to add work "english" to it, clearly just english search words are not enough to convince it to give me english-speaking results, all is in german. Sometimes, even that word doesn't switch it.
Its pretty pathetic for otherwise stellar tech company of such scale, and since we are in 2026 clearly not a priority for anybody.
I agree with parts of this in the sense that I find autoplay on Spotify and many machine recommendations quite bad.
However:
a) I don't want better-targeted ads or more convenient infinite recommendation algorithms because they create friction that preserves some intentionality in my media consumption.
b) there's some survivorship bias here. We notice the bad things because they stand out, but not all of the machine-recommended things that we unquestioningly accept.
The other bizarre case is how there's no accounting for social class: it ought to be relatively easy to infer, yet they still serve ads that you'd never ever consider, even though there are ones you might (at a push: I'm generally keen to avoid ads always)
Goes to show the middlemen (the ad engines, ad auction sites) don't really have either the user or the advertiser's best interests in their mind. They just want to fill up the slots, and some ad agency is churning out ads and all they care about is some CTR/CPC metrics to get their fees, and the end manufacturer adds that markup to the product and charges them to the actual legitimate customers of those products.
Nail / head I think; if advertising was truly optimized for what a potential customer is interested in and might buy, there would barely be any ads.
But that's the "buy this now" type of ads, another big category that I don't see on the internet much (...because I have an ad blocker but that aside) is the "brand recognition" type - Nike and Coca Cola for example, a lot of their ads are passive in that they just want you to see the logo and become familiar and comfortable with it. Product placement in media.
> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
Maybe Amazon's generous return policy means people are willing to swap products if shown alternative ones. But surely they already take this into account?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, at least some of the people running ads must be competent, right? I have trouble believing that it's just a flawed incentive structure the whole way down...
Sounds like they optimize on the full population and not for individual. Because if they did it for OP well the metrics would improve.
It is just the curse of naive AB testing. Same stuff happens with apps like Duolingo where it is optimized e2e, not personalized, and then they behave as if their approach is sane.
My guess is that it's good for repeat purchases. You bought that blender, and if you really liked it, here is an ad to remind you of that model again, just in case you want to buy it as a gift for your relatives, or if you just want to buy a spare or something
Perhaps their metrics are broken. Perhaps their metric is the percentage of ads that are shown for a thing the customer eventually bought and it doesn't consider whether you bought it before or after seeing the ad.
I agree with the author that it is super annoying when you are assaulted with ads for the things that you have bought recently.
If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.
I was actually surprised a few days ago when I have seen for the first time in many years a personalized ad that was useful. When I visited an on-line shop, I was greeted with a message that a product at which I have looked during a previous visit, but which I have not bought, has a 20% price reduction, and at the new price I was indeed interested to buy it.
This kind of notification, about a price reduction, makes sense, but ads for products to which I have looked previously and nothing has changed about them do not achieve any useful purpose. If I bought them I have no need to buy them again, if I did not buy them, this means that I decided that I do not need or want them, so I will not buy them regardless if I see ads for them.
>People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why
Time consuming research (starting with filtering out advertising budget powered fake reviews) and short-lived products & brands make personal experience & recommendations a lot more useful. If someone around me has an even remotely similar set of requirements and budget for a product, they are much more likely better off trusting my recommendation and (having me) order another one right away. It used to be less clustered around one person or calendar date, when brands stayed around and kept true to their previous performance for longer. Nowadays I even order duplicates for myself, not because I really need 3 of them in the near-term future, but because I am worried that I will want a replacement in a year and another one the year after.. and I won't find exactly the same then.
Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.
I don't think the kind of problem that advertisement tries to solve, in our minds as users, can be solved. You can't possibly predict what I will want in the near future unless you can predict my future evolution in tastes and needs, which is a very hard problem in my opinion. Advertisement is needed because the next time you will by chance want a certain kind of product, you will maybe remember a brand over another.
The article assumes adverts are there to show them relevant products that they actually might buy, but adverts are there for the platform to make money. The result of this is that they cast the net far and wide and say you are 'a targeted user' so they can push the advert to you and make more money.
Recently I had my AIs do a massive deep-dive into all traffic going into and out of my phone. The amount of analytics and data being collected is absurd. Even the Android launcher app I use (Nova) is essentially controlled by an analytics company. Everything you do, even on your home screen, is sent to their servers.
A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.
Amazon's recommendation system did this. It would sometimes show random products to make people think the system wasn't as good as it was and to generate funny social media posts featuring Amazon. That's the origin of "people who bought this also bought [unrelated product]" screenshots.
I feel the same way about Youtube's recommendations. They always end up showing me the most bland milquetoast videos you can think of, videos seemingly trying to bait me into watching them, or videos by people who, to be fair, are somewhat similar to people I already watch consistently, but who just don't jive with me. Clicking the 'not interested' button is a non-signal, just how subscribing apparently just isn't a signal they use as well.
I could probably get something pretty decent going if Youtube would give me access to some buttons that actually give their algorithm signals directly. Subscribing and watching every video should be a pretty strong signal. Subscribing and only watching videos with a certain subtitle should be a signal of what videos on that channel I like. There should be a 'channels I don't really care for' bucket, that it might still show me videos from if it's doing exceptionally well. But giving users these tools isn't in the interest of Youtube, so they never will.
I do much better after switching to FreeTube as a front-end for Youtube, since now I'll only be shown videos from people I subscribe to, and I can be on my own to find videos I actually want to watch. If only Youtube search wasn't hot garbage, I might actually see success more often than I do now.
It's definitely a two-sided coin. I don't like the fact that they gather info about me, but I also wish that those few ads that do manage to get through were relevant.
Maybe the answer to this is a proxy ‘you’. Like an llm trained to be like you, that you tote around and then ad companies and so on can interact with to find out whether their ad is something you give a damn about? Or the music services can bounce recommendations off?
I use ChatGPT with memories. The contextual memory is super hit or miss. It works like 40% of the time, but if context is actually important (and it is for a lot of what I talk about), I have to say "alright look up the memories for XYX for context" in like every message.
That works pretty well but me just constantly telling it to grep manually is a bit underwhelming as far as UX goes.
I have enough ad and tracking blocking that the ads I get are totally misdirected. I get ads for drugs for diseases I've never heard of. I get ads for equipment for processing and bottling olive oil in bulk, despite being nowhere near that industry. I get ads from China for very large hydraulic presses, despite not having any great need for metal-forming equipment. And World Dairy Expo wants me to attend, although I don't have any cows.
I lived in Germany for years but don't speak German. I raised a support ticket with Spotify to ask that they stop sending me emails in German, as they full-well know I speak English (the Spotify UI, thankfully, is in English). They declined. I sent their emails to spam.
Amazon is the same. I ended up just not using them, because it was so painful getting their site to talk to me in a language I understand.
And, as TFA points out, we have a mechanism for this: the browser passes a preferred locale to the server. It's simply a matter of the server respecting this and not assuming that everyone who happens to have a German IP address speaks German, which is blatantly not true.
So needed a new toilet seat. My middle aged hairy booty broke the one I had finally. Now Amazon thinks i want toilet seats on subscription. Toilet seat of the months etc. Buy it again... toilet seat reviews even... I wonder if it's not amounting to how much tech companies 'know' but more how much have they automated 'caring'
I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.
> I have no doubts that a lot of information is being tracked, stored, and sold. Since that's already done, could you guys at least use some of it?..
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
Yeah, I’d say improved recommendations are a happy side effect of an otherwise ugly system at this point.
The primary purposes of the data going forward will be: psychological manipulation by political factions and special interest groups, calculating the absolute maximum cost you will bear on any given item or service, and de-risking you to the insurance industry (by increasing your premiums or denying you coverage). In authoritarian societies, it will also be used to build the various lists of undesirables to be expunged, as defined by the current authority (wrong subculture, wrong origin, wrongthink).
Was there something in particular you want more information on? Nothing I've said is exactly a secret.
Do you think it's unlikely that companies collecting and buying large amounts of data on the intimate details of your life would try to use that data to their advantage? Do you think that data isn't being used to manipulate people? To take more of their money? To lower a company's risks?
Do you think that there aren't a growing number of products and services designed to allow them to do exactly those things?
Do you think that companies aren't aware of how consumer perception and awareness of these practices impacts them or that they don't see it as an obstacle?
>Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense
Yep, its not really inflation making things expensive. It's that every company now knows scientifically exactly how much money they can get out of you. Not just how much but literally what minute of the day they can get more money out of you. Probably even charge more by what mood you are in at this point, that is not sarcasm.
They're working hard to implement those kinds of systems everywhere, even in physical retail spaces. There's been a little bit of push back recently now that it's more out in the open, with state level laws against prices set by some personal attributes, but no where near enough.
Not sure I agree specifically with wanting companies to know more about me, but I do wish they made the most of what they know about me (at least in terms of providing me with something of value).
Yeah I agree. I also think western tech companies try not to display the fact that they could know a lot about you in their content recommendation algorithms as a sign of deliberate restraint.
In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.
I suspect it's just expensive to do a good job of it.
Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.
I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.
Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.
Claude is pretty good at this. I finally caved and gave it access to my calendar so I could run a weekly "check what's on nearby and suggest some activities" workflow. It looked at my past calendar activities, built a "taste profile" from that, and now regularly sends me tips for stuff I might want to go to. If I'm keen for something it adds events to the calendar, and optionally invites my partner. It's also surprisingly good at finding "wildcard" events which don't necessarily closely match things I've been to before, but are often interesting to me anyway.
It's different with Meta advertising though. Back in the days Facebook was the only webpage that showed me relevant local targeted ads about things I care for, and nowadays it's the same on Instagram (that I also stopped using recently).
But for a while not too long ago, like for one year until last summer I regularly used Instagram, and almost all ads were directly targeted at my interests and they directed me to local events and concerts and products and what not.
From my social circles I hear many people claiming how amazing are google ads and amazon/youtube recommendations. Which I have never understood, none of the online websites I use tend display anything relevant to me, when they do I bet its kind of random.
When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?
I've been in the same shoes as the Author. The ONLY piece of technology that I have successfully seen actually learn from my usage was Youtube. Just recently, youtube decided I needed a bunch of video game hate videos. But I don't usually want negativity like that, so I pressed not interested on two of them and now they're all gone. This has been the status quo for me for years.
Spotify, Instagram, all those others, it's like the button ENCOURAGES them.
I also stopped getting ads years ago, but it was the same story. Car Ads. I hate cars, I have made it as clear as possible on multiple occasions. Sidebar ads never learn. Amazon never learns. And I bet they keep trying to show me cars to this day.
I always find it amusing when I get a YouTube ad for something completely irrelevant to my life, like an ad for a one-time event in a different city, for over 65's, for a product category I've never exhibited an interest in. Like, I just imagine the marketing dude for that company looking at his incredibly low CTR in disbelief.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
I would gladly fill out a purchasing intent form and consent to having ads shown to me by companies I have never heard of selling the thing I am looking to buy. I would much rather do this than have pervasive, passive data collection, and then have advertisers use that data to guess what I want.
Why would you think that companies want to use this information for your good?
I don't think that they care. Orders of magnitude more resources are poured into A/B retention testing than to user's actual quality of life improvement
I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.
Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
"Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."
This may be a case of a "speed bump" where they are giving an opportunity for the user to recognize/acknowledge the account that is signed into the device.
Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.
But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
Just so I don't get accused of shilling out of self-interest, I don't work (and never have) in advertisements in any way shape or form, nor does my employer make a dime from advertising. This advertising discussion always ends up with two sides: "so what?" and "advertising in any form is evil and everyone involved in it deserves the death penalty" (hyperbole but not by as much as you'd think).
What the former side ignores very often is that there are scam ads to scam websites that are basically malware. The ads with fake sign up buttons, the flashing ads saying you've won money, basically any video ad I've ever seen. They're garbage.
What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
> What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.
I'm not even talking about the adtech surveillance aspect of it. The discussion is often about how advertising itself is, at its core or "fRoM fIRsT prInCiPLeS" or whatever, a Bad Thing. If I'm going to see ads I'd rather see ads for a specific product I might actually want to buy than for products I have no interest in or generic "hey did you know Coca-Cola exists?" brand ad nonsense. I'd love it if that happened without invasive surveillance or Samsung-level malware but I think that's besides the point.
But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?
You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...
There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.
> I'm so jealous of my son because he's 5 years old and they've been collecting all this data on him since he was in the womb and by the time he's my age he's going to have a much better customer experience than I'll ever get
Let's just follow this wishful line of thinking down the success train. So say we have all your data and are perfectly executing on it. What would that world look like? It probably won't have any ads at all. However, when he walks from his house to catch his flight an English speaking taxi will already be waiting, he will be dropped at just the right terminal and his baggage will vanish only to seamlessly re-appear at his hotel in Germany, while he enjoys a flight to Germany with just the right snacks and beverages of his liking on a plane ride, while listening to vocal free techno music.
Above all, avoid googling for really expensive things.
That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"
Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.
What surprises me is that this is state of affairs for Google, a company with unlimited budget - to show you ads for things you expressed just a slightest interest in or have already purchased. And it's a state for a loooooong time.
Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.
But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.
Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!
If the ad market was efficient and worked for the end user it would not work for google/meta/amazon. Their client is the marketing executive with the budget who is under pressure to spend it and not the end-user who is overwhelmed with ads.
I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.
Yeah, I don't see the issue there. Some people buy a mattress, don't like it, and then buy another different mattress. Some people like the mattress they bought for their kid so much they buy a similar one for themselves. Some people like the mattress they bought for their rental house so they buy one for their primary residence. And so on. Sure, it might not be super likely that someone buys multiple mattresses in a short period of time, but if someone has mattress buying on the brain, it is possible.
I don't think people assume there is literally zero signal. I think their intuition is that the repurchase rate is low. Low enough that that if the advertiser knew the purchase was made, then the advertiser would serve something else with a higher predicted chance of getting a click.
It's easy to assign a straw-man a belief there is zero signal and talk down to it. The more nuanced idea that is less obvious goes like this: advertising is such a boondoggle that the aforementioned weak signal actually does represent a higher click-through than everything else in their ad inventory.
Advertisers working in predictive targeting like to tell tall tails about their analytical genius. That story about the Target ad campaign predicting someone was pregnant is their ur myth. The basis for their big swinging statistical analysis prowess. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to their carefully crafted image if they had to admit the peak of their profession is hoping people need a 2nd of something that's usually a less-than-once-a-year purchase.
The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.
Amazon keeps recommending me sequel to books I never finished (which they know as on kindle it tracks how many page you read), or books I gave 1 star reviews to.
I often scream at my Kindle/Audible app: "My brother, you know I hate that series and gave it a 1 star why do you keep recommeding it?"
And I have to go thru crappy Goodreads lists to find an interesting book
My favorite waste of ad money I see is google maps constantly putting "Dollar Tree" as a suggested/sponsored search. Problem is the closest dollar tree is 100KM away.
This is so true - my favorite is when I have hard time to buy something and after I buy my dream thing, the flood of adds with better deals kill my happiness for getting it cheaply:-)
The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.
I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.
If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.
The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
GDPR is limited to companies that have a presence in the EU, or are directed at EU citizens. When you browse the world wide web, you rarely stay only in Europe. Some sites will respect the GDPR, some will block you, and some just don't care.
On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)
Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
You don't get the obvious scam ads with an AI voice-over telling the story of how a lone genius created this amazing thing, but you need to buy now because the government is going to shut them down because their product is too good? Outside of election ads, that's 90% of what I see on youtube.
I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).
> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
It does not. My point was that even with excessive tracking these companies are incapable of showing me stuff I can read or advertising me things I can, even in theory, buy.
Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.
Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.
That doesn't explain why they show me ads in a language I don't understand just because I have ip from that country. I'm sure they know it of they know my gender, at least approximate age and other stuff.
Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.
Same, so I always use the Subscriptions tab to see just what I have subscribed to. But of course, just this week they have hidden it. It's still there fortunately, but you have to dig for it.
I wish they knew both more and less, depending. No paradox just a synthesis per the Hegelian dialectic. I've seen ads which were clearly leveraging a creepy/dangerous piece of info they had about me. And I've seen dumb ads trying to sell me products I no longer have any reasonable interest in because I just fricken bought them the damn thing.
The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.
I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
i worked at google for 18 years. they certainly "know" you don't like ads, and they definitely don't care. they may also "know" your consumer account is a safe place to dump all the non-converting impressions they need to burn somewhere, but even if you could prove that, they wouldn't care. tbh, whenever somebody comes at me with tin foil hat assertions i point to this exact hilarious scenario as why i do not believe they are actually surveillance-oriented business a la the palantirs of the world. i think their ideal state is 100 trillion anonymous bank accounts they can pull from, not 8 billion unique human profiles to care about.
Google's culture is to just burn ungodly amounts of disk space as a kind of flex for how important a team's project is. So every Google service is collecting as much as it can, all the time, with legal counsel and some "oh we value your privacy" sophistry going on.
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
I think you're missing the point of ads. They're not (only) there so you click on them and buy something, they're there because it implants the brand into your mind.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?
I did a search (not on Google) for an unusual sensor the other day. I found a candidate and went to their web site and looked at some data sheets. All of a sudden, I see ads for this company on every page with Google ads (and ther are a LOT of those!)
I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).
I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.
Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...
Here's a comment I couldn't send on hn a couple of days ago because of limit, I saved it as a txt file in my desktop. The context was a user claiming we should assume everything we do, even typing into a form, is or will be public.
"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?
Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."
I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?
Google almost certainly uses stuff in your gmail to recommend ads to you. I had a very, very specific thing that was ongoing for a year or so and as soon as I sent someone an email about it last week, a lot of ads starting showing up for that very specific, not common situation on YouTube.
Maybe the person you sent it to Googled it almost immediately. Then the gmail meta data linked you to the specific thing and that association followed you to YouTube.
> All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.
Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people -
If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise.
Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.
Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?
it's not just third-party ads, the worst is even on companies' own websites. i.e., I'll be signed into an airline for which I have the airline CC and I'll be hit with a bunch of suggestions to sign up for their credit card. That's information they already have.
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
Another one here. Vocal techno is a pain in my ears. There are few exceptions like in Bonzai Records classic tracks like “Let there be house.” or Emmanuel Top. These male voices are more aggressive and are helping to inject some additional energy into the songs, while female voices seem to drain it.
Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.
Fellow House/Techno listener. I am astonished that you can even use Spotify/Scrobbles etc. I always feel an outsider as the only way to listen to that genre is livesets, which i meticulously collect and download from various sources (youtube rips, soundcloud, artist releases) and play offline like its 1998. Any modern streaming plattforms are not suitable for that genre at all - you don't want to listen to 1min leadin/out anyways.
Try di.fm
Was a subscriber for a while, but their streaming reliability on poor networks was really bad (also when transitioning from wi-fi to cellular and back) and they weren't keen on fixing it. Spotify works so much better.
I liked their playlists/radios, though and I miss them.
I gave up on them for psytrance. Used to be paying subscriber for many years, but their catalog never really got updated. Got tired of hearing the same tracks over and over.
Digitally Imported... Now there's a throwback.
Wow, they’re still around? Good call!
This is the way! I found my old folder of Tranceaddict live sets recently and I can confirm, they’re all still bangers. :)
I personally love Vocal Trance, DJ Doboy mixes
never thought i'd see bonzai records mentioned on hackernews!
Who is the artist for let there be house?
Last.fm and scrobling was way more accurate 20 years ago than anything available today.
Even iTunes genius was amazing - I shudder to think how much money I blew on $1 songs, but with subscription music there's now no incentive for them to have good discoverability - they get my money either way.
It’s still pretty good. I use it for discovery on my self hosted navidrome setup
Came here to say this. Last.fm was amazing, and I think they just used old fashioned statistics without much in the way of ML.
I would bet that you can train Pandora's algo to respect this preference by thumbing down every vocal techno track. The music genome annotators will have a boolean for vocals in the analysis. You'd likely start using recommendation strategies that use the annotations more than normal. Pandora is still the best for lean back listening.
Pandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.
However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.
The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).
Way back when I used Pandora I found similar behavior if I gave songs thumbs down. It would converge on a small selection of a few artists and their music. It was really good at some genres if I didn't thumbs up or down many songs.
I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.
That isn't a feature of Pandora.
I have quite a few channels:
1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)
2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.
3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".
4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".
Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.
5. "Clancy Brothers".
This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.
6. "Steeleye Span".
This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.
7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)
8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.
Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.
I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.
Maybe you found the secret sauce to Pandora by everyone I know that used Pandora extensively had OPs experience. Myself and my partner both stopped using it after years of paid subscriptions because of that problem
Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.
The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires
> However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.
Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.
In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.
(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)
Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"
We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.
This but ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.
I've never felt so seen. That _fucking_ song.
yes. You are (or at least, were. c. late 2000's) Pandora's customer. They want to maximize engagement either to serve ads or to justify a subscription.
You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.
Have you tried brain.fm? It’s closer to the Lofi genre, has zero vocal which I really appreciate and no quick abrupt, distracting changes. It’s very rhythmic.
Soundcloud is still best for me - you follow artists and people who repost dj sets that you like. Pretty simple and still the standard in berlin afaik.
big soundcloud fan as well but I do wish I had an option to dislike / ban / remove certain artists or tracks.
Enabling their "AutoPlay Station" keeps going to certain tracks that I ALWAYS skip and yet they come back again and again.
What playlist creation tool are you using ?
There's many auto generating dynamic ones. Like the Monday and Criday ones. Plus the DJ new AI thing and then the better stuff is often in all the human curated Spotify lists.
There's also a way on desktop to take an existing g playlist and "create similar" where it tries to make something similar too one of your already made playlists. You have a lot more control using this
It happens to me that I keep skipping certain song but no matter what, it gets again into autoplay.
I’m having that problem, right now, with AppleTV.
The new Korean monster movie, Hope, keeps getting jammed into my watchlist, and I can’t remove it.
I don’t want to watch it, and I’ll bet that watching it, won’t make it go away.
Maybe Bono invested into it…
If you long-press on it and choose View/Goto Episode/Show, are there any third-party apps listed as a way to watch it? If so, and you’re using any of those apps, then check each of their in-app wishlists for it as well; it’s possible that (unlike Netflix) they’re actually well integrated enough into the TV app to cause this. If not, in total seriousness, you could open an Apple Support case that might result in them asking permission to reset your watchlist database records cloud-side.
(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)
Nope. Doesn't work. It's a zombie. I have watched other movies like it, in the past, and I might watch it in the future, but I don't want to pirate it, and I don't want to pay $25 to watch it now.
Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...
One that was forced on something like one billion people, rather than just one, yeah.
There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.
I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.
Spotify was never a good product IMO and for techno it has always been obviously a bad product as many many songs and variants never make it to their platform.
Even YouTube music works better for me most of the time, but SoundCloud clearly takes the lead
Spotify especially likes to push its own AI generated slop tracks because then it gets to pay the royalty to itself
In fact simply no royalty at all.
The music industry associations around the world generally can’t force you to use their royalty system for your own music. So if you make an ai generated track they’re out of the loop completely. As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.
It's important that they pay the royalty to themselves because the royalty is a fraction of your subscription fee divided by the number of royalties paid. Paying one to themselves dilutes the others.
It's amazing how many people commenting on streaming royalties don't understand this fact, claiming for instance that s music treaming service X plays more per stream.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)
I also perform my own covers of songs in my bedroom for free, thereby saving hundreds of dollars on concert fees.
I typically book my shower as the venue, purely for the superior acoustics.
> As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.
I’m so happy that massive corporations can save on royalties by pushing AI slop in my playlist.
I actively thumbs down the 99 of every 100 tracks I don’t like, the services still don’t get it.
I really wish I could use an LLM to select the recommendations
I am afraid LLMs generally don't have a good idea about music, it seems to select based on similar genre cues and texts more than anything else.
I've been using https://www.getsubwave.com lately and it's great, but it is unfortunately already pre-filtered to my music collection. Would be slick to connect to spotify or a streaming service though!
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Holy shit, I’m the exact opposite. I’m so sorry. I am the reason you have to listen to all that vocal trance.
Similar here: I occasionally listen to music on Youtube late in the evening, and always watch a math or physics video in the morning. Simple, but it appears impossible for Youtube.
Sure would be nice if we enforced Payola laws. It's hard to believe that at one point the US Government sought to regulate fairness on something as low-stakes as radio. Today corporations do much worse and our politicians mostly sit by and watch. Maybe a small fine.
There's just no incentivization to do better at this, or they would in a heartbeat
> I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
They get pushed also by what's the most profitable to play out, which is why you get so many bootleggy "Live Version" and shitty remixes.
It's often hard to get Spotify that actually all you want is the unremixed unedited unremastered album version of a track.
Yes, just because an algorithm knows what someone wants doesn't mean the algorithm will give it to them.
In fact, the algorithm is there to make money by changing the choice a person would make otherwise - the subtlety I assume is figuring when someone will accept a "good enough" choice handed to them. But just limiting choice to what you want someone to make might be a simpler approach.
you're on wrong platform, soundcloud
Hey just let them merge a few hundred thousand more PRs of slop and maybe it will work?
Spotify is chock full of payola. Every single playlist l they generate (and auto shuffle mode) has paid ads in it. It’s a terrible product.
That they do not clearly disclose. It is atrocious they can very away with that.
Google's real advertising proposition is they will sell you the audience of an expensive website on a cheaper website. Want to advertise on the New York Times? Why pay their high rates? Google tracks who visits the NYT and offers the advertiser the same audience when they visit Bob's hobby gardening website, which is considerably cheaper to advertise on. That's really why they want to track where you go. Understanding what you want is just a secondary aim to that, if they are interested in it at all, and I agree with the article that they are very poor indeed at it.
Hard to imagine all the combined various bob spend is really very cheaper than a single better placement. You have to imagine this also puts downward pressure on those nyt placement prices and upward pressure on bobs.
it’s not that hard to imagine. you put in bids on bobs, and they only fill on secondary sites.
If there is such an unrealized margin why hasn’t it been eaten up by now? No one should be advertising on nyt at all if what you say is all thats going on.
You are forgetting that the big tech ad companies are cooking the numbers in other ways making them generally untrustworthy. Ask yourself deep down do you trust Meta or Google.
The New York Times doesn't have to bullshit because people want to use it, thus it's a more trustworthy advertising point.
The NYT has been caught bullshitting at least a few times including one that started/worsened a major atrocity that's still ongoing
Which one?
They famously cheerlead the Iraq War. Not sure if that's what OP meant
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
Businesses don't want to pay for marketing that doesn't work and the simple answer is targeted ads work. Advertising to anyone that reads the New York Times, when a business can target people that are searching for a couple of key words relevant to the business' product? Even if it's the company's money and not my own, I'd rather spend it on something with a provable ROI, not just blindly blowing money showing ads to people that wouldn't or can't buy the product.
Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
My parents were frugal; we acquired most possessions second hand, and we learned to view all advertisements with suspicion. Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
> Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
There's a lot of question as to how much advertising is actually worth the cost, at least in terms of actual sales. I suspect that many companies could scale back their spending on marketing substantially and never notice any difference in sales.
Advertising does more than push sales though, it also manipulates consumer perspectives and our culture. It sets expectations. It tries to make you feel inadequate, insecure, and unfulfilled. It modifies how we act and the ways we express ourselves. It changes how we see ourselves and the world. Maybe that is what's really worth the money.
My brother worked for Proctor & Gamble, which is a company whose success is built entirely on the magical effect of advertising.
As part of his training he had to run an advertising campaign for a minor P&G shampoo brand. Training for a finance position, not a product management position! Why would you make somebody in finance handle marketing for a shampoo? Because they need to understand the fundamental mechanics that drive the business. There's no such thing as a good or a bad ad. The only thing that matters is that you flash the name of your product into peoples' primitive lizard brain over and over and over. Pantene, Pantene, Pantene, Pantene. People buy commodity products, and are willing to pay more, solely based on whether they recognize the name or not. Humans have no defense against this.
The Mere Recognition effect exists in pretty much all humans, yes--but it's completely possible to train a reflex of "if I recognize the brand name, it's the same product as the store brand next to it for $150% of the price." My family also did this when I was a kid.
I think this is right on the nose. Advertising as it exists today is not so much about inducing customers to buy your product, as it is propaganda to convince people that your product holds a natural place in society.
When you view ads through this lens, the number of ads for things that consumers do not even directly purchase — like prescription drugs, or oil - makes a lot more sense.
there are ads for oil??
There are ads for oil companies https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forg...
Saudi Aramco had ads all over the world cup.
Oil companies and gas station chains? Sure, maybe not everywhere in the world but absolutely that exists.
And nowadays they're mainly trying to convince us that these companies are green and part of the zero emissions/carbon negative solution
In ads, oil companies usually call themselves "energy" companies.
Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
I’m sure we can trust the folks whose whole business model is “we’re real good at convincing people to spend their money” when they say their product is a super effective tool that every business owner should spend money on. Right?
It's like that on YouTube today. Every single company that buys in-video advertisements ("sponsors") on YouTube has turned out to be a scam in one way or another. Every single one. The VPNs are probably the least bad, since they deliver the service as promised, they're just overselling how much you need the service, but at least it's not very expensive. Well that and the meal ingredient delivery, which is just overpriced.
Established Titles doesn't make you a lord. Honey doesn't save you money. Brilliant doesn't help you learn things. Betterhelp doesn't connect you with real therapists. I forgot the others.
The mattresses are fine. They're a little overpriced (aren't all mattresses), but they're at least real products.
If I get advertised something on youtube, I instantly assume it's not very good. I only use onshape because I was personally recommended it by a friend. It does the job, mostly
There's also manscaped. I just assume they are crap too since the rest are.
The VPN side - it feels more like a honeypot than anything else to me.
I'll sometimes use the VPN mode from Proton, but I wouldn't sign up for just a vpn - I simply assume they are selling my data the same as everyone else. The only way to convince me otherwise is an open-source non-profit vpn properly overnighted by the community.
They have their uses but their uses are not the advertised uses.
Ridge wallet isn't a wallet.
We're talking about entertainment products. What do you think it would be like to be the only Star Trek fan in 80s Mongolia? I think it would be pretty sad. Yes, the show would still be the same, still be as good, but you have no one to share it with. They simply don't get it.
So even the most hardcore nerds adapt their tastes to what other people like. It's not so hard, because hey, there are other good TV shows, there's other reasonable entertainment. It's hard to say objectively that a Star Trek convention is better than a Mongolian Chess tournament anyway.
But when advertising comes into the picture... It's not that you necessarily think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the best thing ever. It's that you know everyone will be talking about it, everyone will be referencing it, so if you can find at least decently entertaining you should maybe prioritize getting into that over getting into Danish underground comics from the 90s.
Yeah in my family seeing a TV advertisement was a warning that they spent a lot of the money on advertising and not as much on the product itself.
If the company is paying for ads, it's being paid off by higher margins.
Or they have a problem retaining customers and are looking for fresh meat.
I just don't buy things that have adverts I find annoying.
I did some web development work for an advertising guy about 20-odd years ago and he found my position on it baffling.
"But advertising works on everyone!" he cried, "everyone remembers their favourite adverts! Why do you buy oh for example the washing powder you buy?"
Well, I buy Persil, because it's what my mum buys, and I like how it smells. I tried other washing powders, but I didn't like how they smelled so much, and there are two brands I won't buy because they have annoying shouty adverts.
He just didn't get it at all.
From a similar mindset: Some kinds of expensive promotional signals (like a smartphone showroom with wasted floor-space) become a bad sign, especially if the company/product already has wide brand-name recognition.
If the company can afford to throw money at Frivolous Thing X, the money has to come from somewhere, which implies it comes from consumers who aren't actually getting a good deal on the product or service.
> Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
One doesn't need to be frugal or come from such environment, its more about basic human decency and mental hygiene. You try to manipulate me to buy your product, normalize its existence etc? Ok will make sure to avoid that, there is a lot of competition. Too pushy and seeing it everywhere? it means you over-invested on marketing manipulation and product has probably seen some dramatic cost-cutting to make it all together still financially viable. In any case, customer lost.
uBlock origin with Firefox on internet, including (especially!!!) on phone. Ads simply don't exist in my world under normal circumstances, not on general web, nor on youtube. When something bad happens and I see internet or youtube without those protections, its properly nauseating and outright insulting to me.
But - I've seen people en masse already conditioned to accept this, they watch it all, some of them even take hints for their shopping habits. When questioned, they don't see anything wrong, don't care about manipulation. Sometimes I feel like an alien. Luckily my wife sees it the same, I'll go to great lengths to protect my young kids from this cancerous soul garbage. 'Better' parents from our circles see it similarly, for now at least.
The secret that most people in business don’t want to admit is that the vast majority of internet/media advertising is not worth the cost.
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
It's partly true, but only if no-one advertises. If I don't advertise but a competitor does, then I start to lose market share. So although the cost may not justify itself independently, in the face of my competitors' marketing budget, it does.
That reminds me of one of my idiosyncratic policy wishes: An enormous pigouvian tax on any advertising beyond a spreadsheet listing quantitative technical data about the product. Companies don't lose anything, since the relative spend and impact remains the same; consumers gain a lot of information and public funding, and lose daily aggravation.
Pigovian taxes were invented to compensate for externalities. Where's the externality here? You go to a website. The website owner says "watch this ad to access my content". It's a free agreement (or disagreement) between you and the website owner, nobody else is harmed.
Since advertising spending is largely zero-sum, additional spending on advertising may shift market share, but it does so without delivering new factual utility or consumer surplus. The fact that there's a pareto-superior equilibrium makes it a symmetric reciprocal externality: Robert H. Frank showed, in "Positional Externalities Cause Large and Preventable Welfare Losses" (2005) that positional arms races are shaped exactly like environmental pollution.
But, even if there's a better equilibrium, isn't loading a website crammed with obtrusive ads still a coasean bargain between two parties? Simon P. Anderson and Stephen Coate studied this question in "Market Provision of Broadcasting: A Welfare Analysis" (2005). They identified unpriced externalities like the common-pool attention tragedy, as has been raised in other comments here, and asymmetric information & hold-up, which increase transaction costs.
Divide advertising spend into two components: Informative specs, and persuasive/obtrusive spend. The margial external cost is the sum of profits foregone by rival businesses, and aggregate viewer nuisance. A pigouvian tax with an exemption threshold for factual spreadsheets and apunitive rate on expenditure above that (or visual intrusion metrics) both prices the cognitive nuisance imposed on readers, and collapses the positional arms race between rival firms; transforming the industry from a high-waste prisoner's dilemma to a low-cost, high-information pareto optimum.
Obviously, you still have to watch out for firms goodharting the spreadsheet metric, but that's both a partially solvable problem, and a much better situation than the current nash equilibrium.
What do you even consider advertising?
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
Only a very small part of advertising is actually product promotion. Coca-cola spends $4 billion a year on ads, do you think it's because otherwise no one would know that coke exists?
It's true that advertising is a great way to promote a product, but its far from the only way. For many years now I've done what I can to cut all advertising out of my life and yet I still buy lots of things, including things I've never seen a single ad for.
If Coca Cola stopped advertising for a year, their sales would surely start trending down.
Yes, but not because advertising lets people know about Coke. The people who still know about Coke would be the same after a year, I imagine.
The mechanism of how advertising works seems to be not that. I think repeatedly brand exposure does something to the brain and decision making that we don’t fully understand.
Familiarity, I think.
Exposure breeds familiarity, which breeds desire, I think.
Even if all you hear is an occasional ad about the company, you might get curious and research them yourself.
If you drink it now, would you stop? Would you forget that it exists even though it's on store shelves, in vending machines, and pushed at several restaurants? Who would stop?
Almost no-one can honestly answer this for themselves. I think the truth is likely: 'no, I'd still order a coke at McDonald's, I'd still pick a coke up from a vending machine if I'm thirsty. But if I'm buying a takeaway sandwich, I might not also get the drink. Or if I'm in the supermarket, I might just skip that aisle.'
I'm sure it's almost completely subconscious.
Marketing. Advertising is only one of the strategies that get used to market a product.
I was referring to internet advertising, I should have made that more clear.
But it's the dirty little secret of most advertising: there's no voluntary feedback to prove (consistently, objectively) how effective your $$ are being spent.
The last thing a marketing company or media provider wants to admit is that any of their services are underperforming, or worse, turning off buyers.
This isn't true in the general sense, for new products with no distribution or customer awareness it's very important to advertise how else will anyone know about it.
Paid promotion in publications is a much more gentler way to advertise though compared to modern internet advertising. Back in the day I'd buy computer magazines - basically the whole point of which was to make me aware of new products. But the articles were at least somewhat at arm's length and not pure ad copy.
Yeah you can still buy subscriptions to substacks where people recommend you products to buy in certain categories, the entire Semianalysis thing is substack about which GPU/AI Accelerator to buy.
This doesn't in the slightest replace ads though. Before modern internet advertising we had advertising in whatever else had your attention. Ads were meant as we way to simplify and ease distribution.
It's a horrible business in terms of user experience but it's purpose isn't user experience it's meant for businesses to be able to streamline their outreach for much cheaper than the alternatives, imagine cold calls, emails, door knocks, door to door sales has died for this very reason.
I am not trying to explain away the issues and societal problems but they have value of companies otherwise they wouldn't exist. However much people would like to pretend CEOs and founders aren't completely retared.
For initial distribution spikes Ads are the best possible solution, very expensive yes, but if your goal is growth Ads are the most efficient solution since they almost linearly convert spending into visibility in turn producing growth.
Horrible way to do stuff but it's what it is.
Most new products don’t get advertised. That happens later after they’ve made some initial sales. Those initial sales often happen from just placing it on some shelf space, real or virtual, where relevant consumers are liable to find it.
Word of mouth is one of the the oldest ways and it can still be very useful. It tends to work best when your product is actually any good though. If you have a product that really is amazing you won't have to manipulate people into paying for it, and you won't be able to stop people from telling others about how great it is.
chess.com and lichess
Despite lichess being better in every way except marketing, it's still #2.
It's very impressive word of mouth got it to #2, but marketing experts are marketing experts.
the name matters, chess.com= automatically associates with something central about chess. (dot com) lich-ess can be read as lich-chess or leeches, both leave repulsive associations, effectively sub-conscious anti-marketing.
That's a fair point, I wasn't really accounting for new products/services in that statement.
Absolutely untrue by any metrics or semblance of study. People overestimate how unsusceptible they are to marketing. Marketing doesn't only work if you see an ad and click on it. It's after seeing hundreds of ads, that you start internally building a perception of a brand as whatever they market as (expensive, value oriented, fun, serious, luxurious, splurge material, etc.) Then the next time, maybe months after you've seen any such ad, you need to buy an expensive, splurge type gift for someone. If you remember the brand then, the marketing has worked.
That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online
That is a great example of the impossible to prove woo that advertisers pay for studies to convince clients of.
My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
> Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand
Expanding on this.
"Wanna go eat somewhere? Like McDonald's or something?" -> McDonald's is suggested offhandedly[1], but that's only because it's already somewhere in the back of the person's mind, and it's already associated with "eating". It's only "already" there because the person is aware of it. And they're aware of it for whatever reason (one of which could be advertising, but who knows!).
The endgame for advertising is when people become blind to ads, either because they become used to them, or because they hate them so much they "ignore" them (or so they tell themselves). So in both those situations they completely block out the "ad" part of it, and "I saw an ad about a thing that..." becomes "Wasn't there a thing that...?").
[1]: Maybe even defensively, like "if we don't find anything better (or we're not in the mood for anything in particular) there's always this option as a last resort".
The truth today is that almost all consumer products produced today is crap we don’t need. It’s almost literally manufactured landfill, since that’s where most of it will end up.
That’s a wise remark and I haven’t thought about it like that, but it’s entirely true!
I always try to avoid ads as much as possible and not having any social media really helps. But going to use this remark from now on.
> So someone selling hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down?
People who bought BBQs or anything else related to hamburger-adjacent foods or equipment.
People who live or travel through a 30 minute radius of somewhere that they're sold.
People who are able to view the ad between the hours of 11am and 7pm.
People who have engaged with burger-related activity on social media (TikTok, Reddit, YouTube)
People with a higher-than-average association with other burger fans.
All of this information is available for a price.
Just playing devil's advocate:
If I've bought a BBQ and hamburger-adjacent equipment, I probably prefer my hamburgers home-made.
I might view the ad after 7 PM, as that's when I get home from work, and still decide to go there the next day during my commute.
Engaging with burger-related activity might also mean that I run a competing joint, so advertising to me is pointless (unless you want me to buy that one time just to check my competition).
That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
I work in ads targeting
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.
And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.
If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.
As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.
People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.
>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
Even if McDonalds could tell Google not to show the ad to vegetarians, they have no way to verify Google isn't.
At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way
Google has no incentive to do so. McDonalds does, but its somewhat costly to scale against ALL the ads they push.
For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.
Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.
infinite things could confound that analysis
Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already
Can't they ask claude to create account do some relevant searches and then check if ad is shown?
What makes you think Google has built a profile that shows Claude is a vegetarian?
That's the thing - ask claude to do requests to build such profile
I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
But isn't relevance just measured as purchasing the product? That is, someone who can be convinced by advertising to by a ford or a Toyota by which shows the next ad would have equal relevance, even if the Toyota is the vehicle they would most prefer?
I don't understand this principle. Why would Google not accept an ad from Ford for just 1 cent more?
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm still not sure this overcomes the marketing budged differences between entities like "AI Slop Co" vs. "Independent Artist" or "Ford" vs. "Independent Mechanic". There's also the fact that the heaviest advertisers are often the brands I'm going to be least interested in regardless of any other factors[1]. Yes, you can get ad relevance to some local maximum where I do see some stuff I'd actually buy, but optimality is forever out of reach because the products I really want to know about probably spend almost nothing on advertising or have direct competition from an entity like Microsoft that will pour $millions into their ad spend.
[1] VPNs are a perfect example here. I would never use NordVPN because they advertise on every square inch of YouTube. This suggests to me that they're either charging too much for what they offer or they're getting money from their actual customers and the users are simply the inventory they sell to those customers.
Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
We are doing this all wrong. I don't need to be "targeted". There's things I want to buy. Get to know me. Learn what I need. Then, do a JOIN in your database and show me the best options for me.
That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?
Exactly, targeted ads aren't there to find the things you want, they're there to convince you to buy something you didn't want.
> ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products
Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?
People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
On the flip side I only give cash and they all complain its not very thoughtful, no matter how nice the Hallmark money card.
Targeting was super easy back in the days, when it was done based on where the ad appeared. Putting video game ads into a video game magazine and not diaper ads was kind of a no-brainer, but on the net I had to suffer through diaper ads on a video game site.
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
Not everyone feels like you do.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
I agree with part of this. I don't know what Instagram is doing, but their ads are remarkably well targeted. The rest of the internet needs to do whatever they are doing.
> I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?
Whatever Meta is doing on Instagram is next level advertising.
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
The few times I ever used Instagram, it knew me where I went to university (a different country) and then recommended I take a cybersecurity course. That was rather scary because it shouldn't have that information.
> Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
Doesn't it make more sense that these things just advertise better on Instagram? These are all things people like to show off on that platform.
> It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So... you're a typical user of Instagram? I'm not following how this alone isn't the largest signal of all.
Despite hardly posting or commenting, Instagram is the only place I've seen relevant and interesting ads. Like scary good advertising. My wife has had the same experience, she was blown away that the ads are actually relevant where everywhere else, including Facebook which has the same or more info, acts as dumb as you can possibly be. I've heard others say the same. I don't know why they are so much better at ads or literally everyone else sucks so hard that just doing as would be expected appears exceptional. The addendum to this is that in the last few months this fell apart for her account and now it's turned irrelevant.
Convincing a person who doesn’t want a hamburger to buy one is basically mind control and it doesn’t work.
Convincing someone who does want a burger to buy one at Shake Shack does work.
A vegetarian can still buy French fries from McDonalds. An ads are not necessarily about you but about the people in your life too. Think parents getting served gaming ads. They might not want the consoles but their kids will surely appreciate a PS6 for Christmas. Point is, a sale was made. Who ends up using the product isn't that important for the ad imo.
On occasion I get a glimpse at someone else's experience on the web and I'm so thankful that I haven't seen many ads at all in years.
I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.
It's an assault on the mind.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
I don't know if I would say people inherently like ADs, but are perhaps conditioned to expect ADs and makes it feel normal.
Who are these people that like ads? I'm so curious. What do they like about midrolls or popups or banners???
I wouldn't pin them into a particular demographic. I have simply met people over the years who actually see ads as a form of entertainment, almost like pre-entertainment before the real entertainment. If someone isn't adept at recognizing the patterns of manipulation baked into advertising (something I've always been far too aware of), it makes sense they could like ads. After all, ads aren't intended to make the viewer want to turn them off, even if they have that effect on many people anyway.
One of my best friends had banner ads and YouTube ads on his laptop, and there was a day where I finally had to say something about this. I asked him if he ever considered installing an ad blocker and explained how easy it is. He surprised me by saying "Meh, they don't really bother me. I kinda like some of them." As mind-bending as this is from my own perspective, this mindset does seem to exist.
I can also count with more than one finger how many girls I've gone on a movie date with who said "I dunno, I like it" after I made fun of the stupid Coca-Cola commercial or whatever before the trailers. Looking back at this, I probably was being a bit pompous. I'm pretty sure they liked the commercials for the vibes they picked up from their perceived positivity.
Imagine a person who's IQ is a dozen or so points to the left of the curve, those folks like a lot of really really dumb repetitive stuff. I worked with one of these folks in an overnight shift, he had seniority having worked there for many years. He listened to the same comedy show every single shift and laughed at the same jokes at the same spots every single time. I attempted to put on some other comedy thing once, he got pretty angry and demanded that we put on "his" show. Thankfully I was only on with him twice a week, but still I felt like I was going insane.
This sounds more like autism or other neurodivergent thing than unintelligence. I also have a preferred working soundtrack and get pretty annoyed if someone decides to switch it up on me when I'm working! In fact isn't unintelligence fundamentally the inability to pattern recognize well or easily? That he has a "his" show would counter against it...
This is a very uncharitable take IMO that veers into (I’m assuming unintentional) snobbery. Some people just have a routine or whatever that helps them get through the workday. My taste gets a lot simpler when I’m at work for sure. I really enjoy putting on shows I’ve already watched a dozen times, regardless of quality.
Dumb people also exist. It's okay for a person to be dumb. Thats just how it is sometimes.
The HN crowd tends to filter out lower IQ people from their social circles so that it's easy to forget this simple fact about humanity.
Sometimes? Look at IQ distribution, by definition half of folks have it lower. Now I wouldn't use the term 'dumb' if you want any sort of dialog, its not kind (like the opposite would be smart arsehole or similar), ie 'lower intelligence' is derogatory enough.
One thing I've realized - I simply can't grok many of theirs' decisions, viewpoints, values. Its often quite selfish view but rarely just that. And just pure facts rarely pierce the thick veil or version of reality they create for themselves to feel comfortable in this crazy world. Or maybe thats the thing - I don't mind feeling uncomfortable in this world, seeing uncomfortable truths, picking up lesser of evils instead if simple black & white polarity, or the pinnacle - actually changing my opinion on things as I learn more about it.
Or in other words - can't talk to them about anything deeper, nor do I grok them beyond surface layer. But as you say its fine, and also its quite easy to create a life where you just don't meet them, apart from odd situations like car repairs or home reconstruction.
I must be dumber than I thought since I too sometimes enjoy repeating the same routine when engaged in repetitive drudgery.
I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail countless times and I laugh at it every time.
Sometimes things get funnier the more you see them too!
I don't think people like the intrusion. I will say I do like very targeted ads that actually show me the solution to a problem or something fun I'd enjoy. I just don't want them covering the entire internet with garbage, which is the state we're in right now.
Sometimes it's hard to believe how different people perceive things.
I'll never forget the last time I visited the Dell website, it had some popup dialogue constantly jump into view on the side and then disappear again after two seconds or so. It was so infuriatingly distracting to me, meanwhile someone else sitting next to me didn't even notice it before I pointed it out. Which I guess explains why that same person often has trouble finding a seemingly obvious button on screen - it could jump across the screen and some might still not see it.
"Why do people not notice our enormous, prominent and contrasting purple banner?"
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...
I find it especially funny that when I point my eyes directly at the banner (because it's the subject of the question) my brain still filters it out by ignoring it.
I loathe online ads in general because they're the bottom of the barrel, designed to be inconvenient.
But I enjoy creative ads thanks to growing up watching the french tv show Culture Pub: https://www.culturepub.fr/annee-chapitre/2007/
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
Just check the thread in this post like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50378942#50382558
Ads are usually their own vibe and information.
This is especially true when you know how to avoid ads otherwise and are confronted with what must be the default ads for the majority of regular users.
It's like a smell. Some are pleasant, some are fascinating, and some are totally nasty, but I don't willingly plug my nose everywhere I go like a psycho.
What would the world be like without smells? This is a serious question I'm asking. How recalcitrant do you really have to be to get offended by all ads and on the principle of the matter?
Not sure why I still have the Google app on my phone, used to like their live score system, until when from the 3 soccer teams I said I follow they started showing me on the lockscreen/live scores from teams and championships that I never in my life followed anywhere. So, the Google app sometimes sucks me in with various articles, and of course when you click on them, you'ren ot in safari with an ad blocker, but the pure google experience, and somehow I get the feeling that almost all websites out there are impossible to use or to get any information from, as they are 90% ads. You get overlays, audo playing videos, more overlays, more banners, it's impossible to use any website that is a bit popular without any adblocker.
I stopped having cable television in 2001 because I lived in a place where it wasn't available. I moved to a new place in 2002 and went completely pirate media (shitty quality episodes of the Simpsons and such). I went to streaming when that became available, but the point is that I stopped seeing television ads a long time ago.
I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.
I still change the radio station when that song by Jet comes on because I heard it so much in the iPod ads.
I haven’t used an ad blocker in years, and, I don’t know, my brain just sort of learnt to ignore ads. Not “promoted” stuff that looks like regular items in the feeds (e.g. Google ads in search results). But just random banners on the website - I don’t even register them consciously. Every now and then I do notice curiosities like “the meatbag bought a mattress let’s offer him 100 other mattresses”, but otherwise I feel like I am totally blind to ad banners.
I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.
I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.
Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.
Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.
When you eventually need insurance who will you buy it from? One of those companies that you know are insurance companies has a better chance of getting it than some little unknown company. Nobody is immune to propaganda.
The BBC website? Arent the BBC like the only media company that dont show ads?
BBC doesn’t show ads in the UK (bbc.co.uk), but the international edition (bbc.com) does. The site looks quite different, and automatically redirects based on geolocation.
(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)
I did not know that. I have just checked and my UK ISP provided DNS does not even resolve bbc.com!
BBC good food has tons of tracking. Then I found out they don't belong to BBC anymore.
Good Food no longer has any mention of the BBC anywhere except in the domain name. I dont think its fair to call it BBC Good Food any more.
This is true for a few of these “BBC” sites; they were spun out (and merged) into a company called Immediate Media.
Care to name a few others? Genuinely interested.
Similarly, it's eye opening to see the "default" YouTube experience. Conspiracy, manosphere, AI-generated "deep dive" videos: just complete dreck.
It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
I've asked people at Amazon on the recommendation algorithm side about this, since it comes up so often in discussions.
Their answer is that, surprisingly, it is a good heuristic. If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
Is the posterior probability that you'll buy a mattress again shortly after buying one, a small chance? Yes, undoubtedly. But is it smaller than the prior probability of a random person who hasn't bought any mattress at all recently, suddenly being on the market for a mattress? Apparently not.
Weird things can happen with joint probabilities when both sides of the condition are very unlikely. Sort of like how your chance of having some rare cancer after testing positive on a ~99% accurate cancer screening test is still quite tiny.
People always have said this from when I was in ad tech over a decade ago and to be honest, I think it's much more mundane: a delay in the ad tech data pipeline. If you have delayed intent signal, or you have delayed suppression, or even if some conversion gets dropped in the pipeline, you're going to get this effect. People talked about this a lot but almost all the focus on recent purchaser lists was on suppression. So I'm just going to go with the boring explanation: data pipeline error.
I find Amazon recommendations are quite bad. Maybe only 10% are relevant to me.
> If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.
It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
> It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
No, surprisingly people don't actually know or care how things are funded. And that's rational for them and how markets are designed to work.
The reason why I block ads is due to security. Can't be that small of a number
Links that take you to a malicious site are not the only security reason. Ads are often used as vehicles for malicious payloads, some execute when you click on them and some are 0-click.
For me, it was a necessity, as video ads were just starting to be used while I still had dialup, Then came the security angle.
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
Essentially you're right.
The effect is quite strong.
Humans are stupid and fail to make logical decisions, instead they reinforce and justify their previous ones.
Showing you the product you purchased is the best way to get you to transfer your purchase decision to purchase additional other products.
Once your wife sees the internet with less ads she'll never want to go back.
My wife signed up to the Pinterest mailing list. I’ll never understand this.
I mean if you get useful ads that don't feel like a waste of time, I'm sure you'd have a more positive view of ads, not sure the takeaway is normal people like ads, but i'm sure there's something to be said about well timed and targeted ads.
Like the ads I get on instagram, I actually don't mind because they are show me clothing consistent with my taste in clothes or appliance/utilties I'd find useful. Can't say I've ever seen a useful ad on twitter/X or Tiktok.
"because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon)"
I suspect that Amazon somehow get paid for "impressions" by the ad originator.
(it looks very much like a standard enshitification pattern : 1) gain market dominance, 2) screw the users 3) screw the business customers )
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
> It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all
1) and a lot of them prefer them to be gone
2) why it would be a hard truth? I am not expecting that everyone will match my preferences
https://www.mindsinmachines.ai/p/on-agentic-curation
Reminds me a bit of Paul Miller's UI Dyson Sphere concept: https://www.theverge.com/2011/08/03/535880/natural-user-inte...
Basically: capture everything I'm putting out and use it to help me.
Honestly, I've found it's easier and cheaper to just pay for content; instead of having my content peppered with annoying ads and then buying junk I don't want to support the content.
It actually shocks me how often technology in general does the exact wrong thing to what I want. A couple off the top of my head.
* I purchase something and all the recommended products become the thing I just purchased for the next month.
* I do an operation in 3D modeling software that can be applied in 2 directions, it always chooses to apply it in the direction that makes no sense.
* I get recommendations in my social media feeds for what to do in a certain city for 2 months after I already visited and returned home.
* I click on a link to a song, listen for 10 seconds and turn it off because its a genre I don't like, too bad, that is what the algorithm thinks I'm exclusively into now (related, right now I'm struggling with Tidal recommending Swedish language songs because a band I recently discovered is Swedish despite singing in English).
Maybe I don't notice when the computer gets it right most of the time, but it really feels like it gets it wrong more than it gets it right. It also feels like this continually gets worse, when software should be getting smarter at predicting what a user wants. Is it unreasonable to expect that my computer can see that I did the same operation on something twice in a row and that maybe it should prompt me to do it on the rest of the data in the same location?
Yup, it's weird to me that companies as big as Amazon haven't figured this out.
Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.
Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.
ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.
> But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
You might not be, but as a guy with easily a dozen cameras from half a dozen brands, we're absolutely out there, and I know plenty of other folks in my network who do too.
(Reason: I travel a lot, I live stream for a living, and my partner does social media.)
> I live stream for a living, and my partner does social media
I'm old. I don't understand how the economics of this work, and I think of it was explained to me, it would annoy me.
People in TV shows are paid (via the production company) because the TV broadcaster is paid, because it sells advertising during the show. Advertisers pay because the broadcaster can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they commission programmes that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
People in livestreaming are paid because their platform is paid, because it sells advertising during the livestreaming. Advertisers pay because the platform can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they support livestreamers that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
If your question is not the economics but the social aspect (why would someone watch livestreaming?), the answer is that either the livestreamer is doing something cool that people like watching -- and you can be as judgemental about that as you can be for TV shows ("they're watching Real Housewives / a guy speedrunning Super Mario Bros / HYROX championships ??!?!?"), and there is now also the live-service aspect, which you've experienced for decades in the form of talk radio with callers, and DJs taking live requests. Also, in the early days of the internet, there used to be forums that would host watch parties, so everyone watched the TV at the same time and commented in a thread to get the metacommentary and it built up a watching community. That is now integrated into the livestreaming, and the chat sidebar is visible to everyone watching, approximating a live audience, who can let their thoughts be known in a slightly more nuanced way than just cheering/booing/clapping.
That's cool, but would you say banner ads are actually driving your purchases?
But if these companies know so much, surely they can work out that you have this particular buying habit, and other people don't have it.
Once you realize you are the product on Amazon's search page it makes a lot more sense. Over half the listings are paying amazon for higher placement into that search. It's long since stopped being a search experience that works for the shopper.
No, that makes no sense. Sure, my data is valuable for advertisers, but:
The washing machine advertiser doesn't want to to spend money to show me an ad for something I'm not going to buy, and even Amazon doesn't benefit because they get something out of each purchase, so they should want to show me stuff I want to buy too.
There's just nobody that benefits from bad ad selection.
...except Amazon :)
Please explain how Amazon benefits from bad ad selection to an equal or greater extent than good ad selection.
They don't need to compete because they have a monopoly, so offering a worse service keeps the advertiser spending more money.
You do another search, and they get more revenue
>> Guys, if I buy a photo camera
If you buy one camera, you are likely a billion times more likely to buy another. And, you have the disposable income to be in the market.
>> there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines
You are not a whale, but you might be. Most people only buy one washing machine but a few people buy dozens (apartment managers and such). Such people, whales, sometimes buy one as test case. So ya, if you buy one then you are a strong maybe for one day buying many more.
Sometimes I wonder if it's about returns. "You bought one washing machine, but you might not like it and return it, so how about these others". Could even be that they're tracking sales only rather than sales minus returns, because returns take longer to come in so the metrics are harder to track.
The thing is for every 1 guy that just purchased it, the retargeting is getting 99 people who just looked at options and haven't purchased yet. So even if that 1% will never buy again in a short time, the whole cohort is still many times better than random non-retargeted people.
Amazon must make more money from camera brand ads than from selling camera accessories. Every time they push a camera to someone who already has one, they get paid for that, and the ad buyer can't easily verify. The person is flagged as liking cameras, after all.
Forget the camera analogy. Use something like a new toilet seat. I buy one, I don't need to buy more. I'm not a toilet seat collector.
The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?
Music lessons. There were multiple factors they shared, customer acquisition wasn't the only thing not working but that they brought it up at all is why it stood out. Indeed it is the kind of thing where referrals you would have thought would help, but also macro factors against. Competing against apps whether these guys are digital or not, anyone can start up a rival business at home esp if they have instruments already, and so forth.
I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.
because you're not the client.
advertisers are.
you use adblocker. you're persona non grata to begin with. your purchases are not mapped back, that's why you keep seeing the stuff you just bought. for them, you are top of the funnel still. AdBlockers work! (20yrs in adtech)
for music, you're also irrelevant. you're old. music industry doesn't care about 25+ finding new music. they spend all their effort on keeping teenagers in a comfortable bubble to mine them for music purchases and shows. people under 25 spend pretty much all the money record labels make.
anyway, the system works and they do know everything about you. but your goals and desires are completely irrelevant to everyone involved money changing hands.
It always baffles me how advertisers are ok with this either.
Their ad being shown to someone who already bought the thing or is obviously not gonna do so can't be in their interest, can it?
This. The industry does care as little as legally possible about the opinion of humans regarding advertisements. I do not entirely agree, but i understand this from their perspective.
Howver, i do not see why i should not act the exact same to the industry. From my perspective i absolutely hate online advertisements in each and every form. This is a feeling and not something i enforce or endorse to others. You do you concerning advertisements.
If it was legally possible for me to destroy all advertisements, i would. But it is not. I do however control my own infrastructure. I am as sure going to design it so that i am as little as possible bothered by advertisements. The goal of the advertisement industry is completely irrelevant to me.
the horrible performance of targeted ads in the op for both consumers and advertisers is why many advertisers are now going for connected tv, or native ads in market places (e.g you're shopping for detergent - then you see a sponsored listing for another detergent brand)
coz targeted ads as in op - only one party has benefited so far - people running the ad exchanges.
If there's anyone working for YouTube here, instead of the "I'm not interested" button I'd like a free text input where I can describe what exactly I don't like about a video.
What the author wants isn't for tech companies to know per more, but use what they know in per interest. Ads are shown for products you just bought because the algorithm is optimized to maximize conversion of clicks to purchases, not to please the buyer which is a subtle but important difference, and this is what this optimization looks like.
All those ads where paid by some companies, who were probably promised by some google ad salesperson the most focussed and personalized and relevant targeting. Will they get a discount ?
Can the advertiser (as in "the company paying for the ad") get any of those signals ("we're paying for ads, but they're being shown to randos who are never going to by our products") ?
Or are the online ads so cheap that they don't care ?
This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.
No, it's really difficult for 'them' to find out whether you actually purchased something. All the tracking stuff is on social media and the product browsing pages. But not on checkout. Shopping sites can't allow all that stuff there because of security and privacy issues. So big tech doesn't even know whether you bought something. They only know what you have seen. That's why they keep showing it.
Conversion tracking is not merely a thing, I'm under the extremely strong impression that it's standard.
The owner of the shopping site can do it. They know which campaign lead to a sell.
But I have never heard of them passing it on to whatever 3rd party trackers they have on their sites. THAT would be a privacy violation.
You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.
You think of it as the corporate mind control machine. I think of it as "oh, I am looking for a new car and completely forgot Subaru is also making cars that fit my profile - I should test drive them as well".
At least they aren't showing you something you would be tempted to buy?
That's not always good. If I am looking for a kind of product, and an ad recommends a possibly better product that I didn't know about, both sides benefit from it.
It seems they don't know you already bought it, which... maybe they don't and do you want them to?
This happens on places like amazon too, that know I bought a toaster, then show me sponsored results for 50 more toasters.
I think they theory is that you are more likely to have some sort of buyers remorse and return that toaster and buy a new one than a baseline person is to suddenly buy a toaster.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
that’s literalist what they know. it’s called retargeting and it’s the point of these ad systems, to track what people buy to understand how to link buying patterns to other info about people
If I buy a car, I get flushed with ads for cars. Really. Same for an area rug, a vacuum cleaner, and many other things I will never buy two in a row of.
That's just stupid.
Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?
Don't expect too much from ebay, even effin' google search in 2026 (and certainly 2027 too) cannot figure out I am deeply in french speaking part of Switzerland, and thus it may be better to serve me in french. They do have Swiss offices in Zurich mind you.
I keep my Firefox on mobile (with ublock origin) not logged into my google account. Every second search result since forever I need to add work "english" to it, clearly just english search words are not enough to convince it to give me english-speaking results, all is in german. Sometimes, even that word doesn't switch it.
Its pretty pathetic for otherwise stellar tech company of such scale, and since we are in 2026 clearly not a priority for anybody.
I agree with parts of this in the sense that I find autoplay on Spotify and many machine recommendations quite bad.
However:
a) I don't want better-targeted ads or more convenient infinite recommendation algorithms because they create friction that preserves some intentionality in my media consumption.
b) there's some survivorship bias here. We notice the bad things because they stand out, but not all of the machine-recommended things that we unquestioningly accept.
The other bizarre case is how there's no accounting for social class: it ought to be relatively easy to infer, yet they still serve ads that you'd never ever consider, even though there are ones you might (at a push: I'm generally keen to avoid ads always)
Goes to show the middlemen (the ad engines, ad auction sites) don't really have either the user or the advertiser's best interests in their mind. They just want to fill up the slots, and some ad agency is churning out ads and all they care about is some CTR/CPC metrics to get their fees, and the end manufacturer adds that markup to the product and charges them to the actual legitimate customers of those products.
Nail / head I think; if advertising was truly optimized for what a potential customer is interested in and might buy, there would barely be any ads.
But that's the "buy this now" type of ads, another big category that I don't see on the internet much (...because I have an ad blocker but that aside) is the "brand recognition" type - Nike and Coca Cola for example, a lot of their ads are passive in that they just want you to see the logo and become familiar and comfortable with it. Product placement in media.
> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
Perhaps the ad performance is so poor that selling someone the same thing a second time is the best they can hope for.
Maybe Amazon's generous return policy means people are willing to swap products if shown alternative ones. But surely they already take this into account?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, at least some of the people running ads must be competent, right? I have trouble believing that it's just a flawed incentive structure the whole way down...
Sounds like they optimize on the full population and not for individual. Because if they did it for OP well the metrics would improve.
It is just the curse of naive AB testing. Same stuff happens with apps like Duolingo where it is optimized e2e, not personalized, and then they behave as if their approach is sane.
My guess is that it's good for repeat purchases. You bought that blender, and if you really liked it, here is an ad to remind you of that model again, just in case you want to buy it as a gift for your relatives, or if you just want to buy a spare or something
Perhaps their metrics are broken. Perhaps their metric is the percentage of ads that are shown for a thing the customer eventually bought and it doesn't consider whether you bought it before or after seeing the ad.
I agree with the author that it is super annoying when you are assaulted with ads for the things that you have bought recently.
If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.
I was actually surprised a few days ago when I have seen for the first time in many years a personalized ad that was useful. When I visited an on-line shop, I was greeted with a message that a product at which I have looked during a previous visit, but which I have not bought, has a 20% price reduction, and at the new price I was indeed interested to buy it.
This kind of notification, about a price reduction, makes sense, but ads for products to which I have looked previously and nothing has changed about them do not achieve any useful purpose. If I bought them I have no need to buy them again, if I did not buy them, this means that I decided that I do not need or want them, so I will not buy them regardless if I see ads for them.
> If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.
I used to work at a big ad company and went and read about this once. Turns out the opposite is true (in general, maybe not for you specifically).
People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why, but the numbers don’t lie. Gifts maybe?
>People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why
Time consuming research (starting with filtering out advertising budget powered fake reviews) and short-lived products & brands make personal experience & recommendations a lot more useful. If someone around me has an even remotely similar set of requirements and budget for a product, they are much more likely better off trusting my recommendation and (having me) order another one right away. It used to be less clustered around one person or calendar date, when brands stayed around and kept true to their previous performance for longer. Nowadays I even order duplicates for myself, not because I really need 3 of them in the near-term future, but because I am worried that I will want a replacement in a year and another one the year after.. and I won't find exactly the same then.
Was the price reduced for everyone or just you?
Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
I don't think the kind of problem that advertisement tries to solve, in our minds as users, can be solved. You can't possibly predict what I will want in the near future unless you can predict my future evolution in tastes and needs, which is a very hard problem in my opinion. Advertisement is needed because the next time you will by chance want a certain kind of product, you will maybe remember a brand over another.
The article assumes adverts are there to show them relevant products that they actually might buy, but adverts are there for the platform to make money. The result of this is that they cast the net far and wide and say you are 'a targeted user' so they can push the advert to you and make more money.
Recently I had my AIs do a massive deep-dive into all traffic going into and out of my phone. The amount of analytics and data being collected is absurd. Even the Android launcher app I use (Nova) is essentially controlled by an analytics company. Everything you do, even on your home screen, is sent to their servers.
Nova sold out a while ago, look in to alternatives. Or vibecode one yourself! Seems safe enough if you don't need any online functionality.
I ended up indeed putting one together myself. And installed on top of LineageOS.
One day they started showing ads in the app list, 15 seconds later I've uninstalled this shit. No mercy for them, sorry. Lawnchair is pretty good.
A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.
Okay, updated the functional spec: occasionally include some ads orthogonal to user interests to prevent backlash to widespread deep surveillance
Amazon's recommendation system did this. It would sometimes show random products to make people think the system wasn't as good as it was and to generate funny social media posts featuring Amazon. That's the origin of "people who bought this also bought [unrelated product]" screenshots.
I feel the same way about Youtube's recommendations. They always end up showing me the most bland milquetoast videos you can think of, videos seemingly trying to bait me into watching them, or videos by people who, to be fair, are somewhat similar to people I already watch consistently, but who just don't jive with me. Clicking the 'not interested' button is a non-signal, just how subscribing apparently just isn't a signal they use as well.
I could probably get something pretty decent going if Youtube would give me access to some buttons that actually give their algorithm signals directly. Subscribing and watching every video should be a pretty strong signal. Subscribing and only watching videos with a certain subtitle should be a signal of what videos on that channel I like. There should be a 'channels I don't really care for' bucket, that it might still show me videos from if it's doing exceptionally well. But giving users these tools isn't in the interest of Youtube, so they never will.
I do much better after switching to FreeTube as a front-end for Youtube, since now I'll only be shown videos from people I subscribe to, and I can be on my own to find videos I actually want to watch. If only Youtube search wasn't hot garbage, I might actually see success more often than I do now.
It's definitely a two-sided coin. I don't like the fact that they gather info about me, but I also wish that those few ads that do manage to get through were relevant.
Maybe the answer to this is a proxy ‘you’. Like an llm trained to be like you, that you tote around and then ad companies and so on can interact with to find out whether their ad is something you give a damn about? Or the music services can bounce recommendations off?
Loved that little rant. You had me at "I skip every single electronic track with vocals".
Same... I had a moment of "wait, did I write this??"
It's almost as though we all share a certain trait in common...
I use ChatGPT with memories. The contextual memory is super hit or miss. It works like 40% of the time, but if context is actually important (and it is for a lot of what I talk about), I have to say "alright look up the memories for XYX for context" in like every message.
That works pretty well but me just constantly telling it to grep manually is a bit underwhelming as far as UX goes.
I have enough ad and tracking blocking that the ads I get are totally misdirected. I get ads for drugs for diseases I've never heard of. I get ads for equipment for processing and bottling olive oil in bulk, despite being nowhere near that industry. I get ads from China for very large hydraulic presses, despite not having any great need for metal-forming equipment. And World Dairy Expo wants me to attend, although I don't have any cows.
Where do you get ads if you're using ad blocking?
Youtube, and in spam folders.
The language thing shits me to tears.
I lived in Germany for years but don't speak German. I raised a support ticket with Spotify to ask that they stop sending me emails in German, as they full-well know I speak English (the Spotify UI, thankfully, is in English). They declined. I sent their emails to spam.
Amazon is the same. I ended up just not using them, because it was so painful getting their site to talk to me in a language I understand.
And, as TFA points out, we have a mechanism for this: the browser passes a preferred locale to the server. It's simply a matter of the server respecting this and not assuming that everyone who happens to have a German IP address speaks German, which is blatantly not true.
So needed a new toilet seat. My middle aged hairy booty broke the one I had finally. Now Amazon thinks i want toilet seats on subscription. Toilet seat of the months etc. Buy it again... toilet seat reviews even... I wonder if it's not amounting to how much tech companies 'know' but more how much have they automated 'caring'
I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.
> I have no doubts that a lot of information is being tracked, stored, and sold. Since that's already done, could you guys at least use some of it?..
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
Yeah, I’d say improved recommendations are a happy side effect of an otherwise ugly system at this point.
The primary purposes of the data going forward will be: psychological manipulation by political factions and special interest groups, calculating the absolute maximum cost you will bear on any given item or service, and de-risking you to the insurance industry (by increasing your premiums or denying you coverage). In authoritarian societies, it will also be used to build the various lists of undesirables to be expunged, as defined by the current authority (wrong subculture, wrong origin, wrongthink).
You've made a lot of vague claims, with no real substance.
Was there something in particular you want more information on? Nothing I've said is exactly a secret.
Do you think it's unlikely that companies collecting and buying large amounts of data on the intimate details of your life would try to use that data to their advantage? Do you think that data isn't being used to manipulate people? To take more of their money? To lower a company's risks?
Do you think that there aren't a growing number of products and services designed to allow them to do exactly those things?
Do you think that companies aren't aware of how consumer perception and awareness of these practices impacts them or that they don't see it as an obstacle?
>Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense
Yep, its not really inflation making things expensive. It's that every company now knows scientifically exactly how much money they can get out of you. Not just how much but literally what minute of the day they can get more money out of you. Probably even charge more by what mood you are in at this point, that is not sarcasm.
They're working hard to implement those kinds of systems everywhere, even in physical retail spaces. There's been a little bit of push back recently now that it's more out in the open, with state level laws against prices set by some personal attributes, but no where near enough.
The supermarket price tags that change price depending on which phones are in that aisle are actually insane.
Not sure I agree specifically with wanting companies to know more about me, but I do wish they made the most of what they know about me (at least in terms of providing me with something of value).
And Google cannot correctly classify the spam I'm receiving. For example:
Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2
From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com
Yeah I agree. I also think western tech companies try not to display the fact that they could know a lot about you in their content recommendation algorithms as a sign of deliberate restraint.
In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.
What a naive take. The data collected by them is not there to serve you better with music or news!
You are not their client. And never been. And will never be.
Banks, credit unions, advertisers, insurance companies and the local and federal police. That's some of their clients.
I tend to agree, if you have my information, use it to make my experience better!
I suspect it's just expensive to do a good job of it.
Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.
I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.
Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.
Claude is pretty good at this. I finally caved and gave it access to my calendar so I could run a weekly "check what's on nearby and suggest some activities" workflow. It looked at my past calendar activities, built a "taste profile" from that, and now regularly sends me tips for stuff I might want to go to. If I'm keen for something it adds events to the calendar, and optionally invites my partner. It's also surprisingly good at finding "wildcard" events which don't necessarily closely match things I've been to before, but are often interesting to me anyway.
It's different with Meta advertising though. Back in the days Facebook was the only webpage that showed me relevant local targeted ads about things I care for, and nowadays it's the same on Instagram (that I also stopped using recently).
But for a while not too long ago, like for one year until last summer I regularly used Instagram, and almost all ads were directly targeted at my interests and they directed me to local events and concerts and products and what not.
And the least relevant is what I see in Youtube. Including its recommendation feed. It's showing me 80-90% things I dislike. Similarly on X/Twitter.
They are in the business of selling you things, their positive signal is not "what makes your life better" but "what makes you buy more".
From my social circles I hear many people claiming how amazing are google ads and amazon/youtube recommendations. Which I have never understood, none of the online websites I use tend display anything relevant to me, when they do I bet its kind of random.
When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?
I've been in the same shoes as the Author. The ONLY piece of technology that I have successfully seen actually learn from my usage was Youtube. Just recently, youtube decided I needed a bunch of video game hate videos. But I don't usually want negativity like that, so I pressed not interested on two of them and now they're all gone. This has been the status quo for me for years.
Spotify, Instagram, all those others, it's like the button ENCOURAGES them.
I also stopped getting ads years ago, but it was the same story. Car Ads. I hate cars, I have made it as clear as possible on multiple occasions. Sidebar ads never learn. Amazon never learns. And I bet they keep trying to show me cars to this day.
I always find it amusing when I get a YouTube ad for something completely irrelevant to my life, like an ad for a one-time event in a different city, for over 65's, for a product category I've never exhibited an interest in. Like, I just imagine the marketing dude for that company looking at his incredibly low CTR in disbelief.
They left the targeting checkboxes all unchecked. Basically an intern wrote a free check to Google.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
I would gladly fill out a purchasing intent form and consent to having ads shown to me by companies I have never heard of selling the thing I am looking to buy. I would much rather do this than have pervasive, passive data collection, and then have advertisers use that data to guess what I want.
> could you guys at least use some of it?
Why would you think that companies want to use this information for your good?
I don't think that they care. Orders of magnitude more resources are poured into A/B retention testing than to user's actual quality of life improvement
I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.
Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
"Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."
Programmers :-D
Sadly Dropout.tv just started doing this to me too (a user selection screen with only a single user on every app start).
Good thing is, Dropout is small enough that you could probably get the engineer's attention by just putting this out into the ether enough times
This may be a case of a "speed bump" where they are giving an opportunity for the user to recognize/acknowledge the account that is signed into the device.
Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.
But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
Who is advertising for ? Maybe your mistake is supposing it is to benefit you in any way shape or form ?
"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"
Just so I don't get accused of shilling out of self-interest, I don't work (and never have) in advertisements in any way shape or form, nor does my employer make a dime from advertising. This advertising discussion always ends up with two sides: "so what?" and "advertising in any form is evil and everyone involved in it deserves the death penalty" (hyperbole but not by as much as you'd think).
What the former side ignores very often is that there are scam ads to scam websites that are basically malware. The ads with fake sign up buttons, the flashing ads saying you've won money, basically any video ad I've ever seen. They're garbage.
What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
> What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.
I'm not even talking about the adtech surveillance aspect of it. The discussion is often about how advertising itself is, at its core or "fRoM fIRsT prInCiPLeS" or whatever, a Bad Thing. If I'm going to see ads I'd rather see ads for a specific product I might actually want to buy than for products I have no interest in or generic "hey did you know Coca-Cola exists?" brand ad nonsense. I'd love it if that happened without invasive surveillance or Samsung-level malware but I think that's besides the point.
But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?
You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...
There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.
Paraphrasing comedian Connor O'Malley
> I'm so jealous of my son because he's 5 years old and they've been collecting all this data on him since he was in the womb and by the time he's my age he's going to have a much better customer experience than I'll ever get
Let's just follow this wishful line of thinking down the success train. So say we have all your data and are perfectly executing on it. What would that world look like? It probably won't have any ads at all. However, when he walks from his house to catch his flight an English speaking taxi will already be waiting, he will be dropped at just the right terminal and his baggage will vanish only to seamlessly re-appear at his hotel in Germany, while he enjoys a flight to Germany with just the right snacks and beverages of his liking on a plane ride, while listening to vocal free techno music.
Sounds impossible to figure out.
Above all, avoid googling for really expensive things.
That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"
Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.
What surprises me is that this is state of affairs for Google, a company with unlimited budget - to show you ads for things you expressed just a slightest interest in or have already purchased. And it's a state for a loooooong time.
Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.
But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.
Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.
Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!
You are the product!
I sometimes think that people believing targeted advertising doesn’t work is exactly why it does.
In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.
recentl i watched a classic stone old german/french spy movie "Le Serpent" on prime video on the smart tv. not ending it.
i went to bed and opened youtube. guess what, there it was again.
Not to brag, but I don't have any of these problems. I also don't have a google account
If the ad market was efficient and worked for the end user it would not work for google/meta/amazon. Their client is the marketing executive with the budget who is under pressure to spend it and not the end-user who is overwhelmed with ads.
I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.
Yeah, I don't see the issue there. Some people buy a mattress, don't like it, and then buy another different mattress. Some people like the mattress they bought for their kid so much they buy a similar one for themselves. Some people like the mattress they bought for their rental house so they buy one for their primary residence. And so on. Sure, it might not be super likely that someone buys multiple mattresses in a short period of time, but if someone has mattress buying on the brain, it is possible.
I don't think people assume there is literally zero signal. I think their intuition is that the repurchase rate is low. Low enough that that if the advertiser knew the purchase was made, then the advertiser would serve something else with a higher predicted chance of getting a click.
It's easy to assign a straw-man a belief there is zero signal and talk down to it. The more nuanced idea that is less obvious goes like this: advertising is such a boondoggle that the aforementioned weak signal actually does represent a higher click-through than everything else in their ad inventory.
Advertisers working in predictive targeting like to tell tall tails about their analytical genius. That story about the Target ad campaign predicting someone was pregnant is their ur myth. The basis for their big swinging statistical analysis prowess. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to their carefully crafted image if they had to admit the peak of their profession is hoping people need a 2nd of something that's usually a less-than-once-a-year purchase.
Like it really much. Very valid points!
The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.
This is like saying "If I have to eat the shit sandwich, then it should at least have the mustard I like on it."
Its as bad, or even worse.
Amazon keeps recommending me sequel to books I never finished (which they know as on kindle it tracks how many page you read), or books I gave 1 star reviews to.
I often scream at my Kindle/Audible app: "My brother, you know I hate that series and gave it a 1 star why do you keep recommeding it?"
And I have to go thru crappy Goodreads lists to find an interesting book
My favorite waste of ad money I see is google maps constantly putting "Dollar Tree" as a suggested/sponsored search. Problem is the closest dollar tree is 100KM away.
If you and all your neighbors search for it every day, they will open up new stores within 3km
This is so true - my favorite is when I have hard time to buy something and after I buy my dream thing, the flood of adds with better deals kill my happiness for getting it cheaply:-)
I wish I was served ads for asphalt cleaning tractors
I follow a few football pages and FB shows more football pages, mostly rival teams. Guess what, I hate the rivals.
The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.
I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
Be careful what you wish for, because you might actually get it
> I live in Helsinki
So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.
If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.
The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
GDPR is limited to companies that have a presence in the EU, or are directed at EU citizens. When you browse the world wide web, you rarely stay only in Europe. Some sites will respect the GDPR, some will block you, and some just don't care.
On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)
Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
You don't get the obvious scam ads with an AI voice-over telling the story of how a lone genius created this amazing thing, but you need to buy now because the government is going to shut them down because their product is too good? Outside of election ads, that's 90% of what I see on youtube.
Why would dusting brushes no longer exist? Has something happened to dust?
Maybe GP was thinking about hand vacuums? Still, dusting brushes are still a thing
they know plenty about you, they just don't care what you want.
I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).
> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
It does not. My point was that even with excessive tracking these companies are incapable of showing me stuff I can read or advertising me things I can, even in theory, buy.
Terrible targeting has a simple explanation.
Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.
Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.
That doesn't explain why they show me ads in a language I don't understand just because I have ip from that country. I'm sure they know it of they know my gender, at least approximate age and other stuff.
As ads are inherently adversarial I prefer in fact badly targeted ads.
I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.
My weakness is rain and getting wet.
I saw an ad for $30 water proof shoes at Costco.
I have no illusion that these are the most comfortable/durable shoe in the world, but I do believe that they are $30 and water proof.
I didn't know they existed because they are online only. But I'm very glad I saw this ad, especially with the el nino season coming up in california
I bought water proof shoes after measuring them in shop, 7th size/model variant I tried.
Doing it online, even with free returns, would be far more annoying.
We're not talking about the same thing.
I'm saying I didn't know those shoes existed, especially at that price point.
Are you claiming that you are fully aware of all the products in the world that would be a benefit to you?
Its a discovery problem, not a fulfillment problem.
> Are you claiming that you are fully aware of all the products in the world that would be a benefit to you?
No, but ads are not effective way of learning about them. Too much of lying and deliberately misleading info and manipulation.
Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.
Same, so I always use the Subscriptions tab to see just what I have subscribed to. But of course, just this week they have hidden it. It's still there fortunately, but you have to dig for it.
All the terrible targeting is because advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want.
They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
Also if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you're doing pretty good on the hiding.
I wish they knew both more and less, depending. No paradox just a synthesis per the Hegelian dialectic. I've seen ads which were clearly leveraging a creepy/dangerous piece of info they had about me. And I've seen dumb ads trying to sell me products I no longer have any reasonable interest in because I just fricken bought them the damn thing.
The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.
I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
i worked at google for 18 years. they certainly "know" you don't like ads, and they definitely don't care. they may also "know" your consumer account is a safe place to dump all the non-converting impressions they need to burn somewhere, but even if you could prove that, they wouldn't care. tbh, whenever somebody comes at me with tin foil hat assertions i point to this exact hilarious scenario as why i do not believe they are actually surveillance-oriented business a la the palantirs of the world. i think their ideal state is 100 trillion anonymous bank accounts they can pull from, not 8 billion unique human profiles to care about.
Google's culture is to just burn ungodly amounts of disk space as a kind of flex for how important a team's project is. So every Google service is collecting as much as it can, all the time, with legal counsel and some "oh we value your privacy" sophistry going on.
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
Advertising works on everyone. The more you think it doesn't, the more it does.
Fair. Either way, I don't want to see it.
I think you're missing the point of ads. They're not (only) there so you click on them and buy something, they're there because it implants the brand into your mind.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?
I did a search (not on Google) for an unusual sensor the other day. I found a candidate and went to their web site and looked at some data sheets. All of a sudden, I see ads for this company on every page with Google ads (and ther are a LOT of those!)
I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).
I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.
Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...
Here's a comment I couldn't send on hn a couple of days ago because of limit, I saved it as a txt file in my desktop. The context was a user claiming we should assume everything we do, even typing into a form, is or will be public.
"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?
Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."
I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?
Google almost certainly uses stuff in your gmail to recommend ads to you. I had a very, very specific thing that was ongoing for a year or so and as soon as I sent someone an email about it last week, a lot of ads starting showing up for that very specific, not common situation on YouTube.
Maybe the person you sent it to Googled it almost immediately. Then the gmail meta data linked you to the specific thing and that association followed you to YouTube.
How are we blocking ads on an iPhone these days?
> All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.
Companies track us with cookies[1] [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/how-cookies-became-the-we...
Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.
Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?
it's not just third-party ads, the worst is even on companies' own websites. i.e., I'll be signed into an airline for which I have the airline CC and I'll be hit with a bunch of suggestions to sign up for their credit card. That's information they already have.