I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.

“A scramble to implement GDPR, last-minute scramble to inplement GDPR when it arrived in May” vs “it won’t be a scramble in the US, as companies will have until 2020 to prepare”.

These companies similarly had two years to prepare. And I’m glad they took the hit for not doing so. I’m also glad they’re discovering that selling private info left and right isn’t the only way to earn money with ads.

https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-y...

NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.

It's why TV ads are so expensive and wasteful, but lucrative for networks.

Like, fashion and clothing can be pretty individualistic so it might actually help to micro-target. Not even just for styles, but if you're a swim suit maker who specializes in plus-sized clothes you can target ads at them. You could even not bother sending ads for a sale on jeans to people with, say, size 30 inseams if you're sold out of jeans in that size. I never see them used this way though.

But almost every use case I can think of that is mutually beneficial (like the sizing), seems to be demographic information rather than behavioral analytics. I'm having trouble coming up with a way to leverage behavioral analytics in a way that doesn't seem invasive or impertinent. I guess it might work for content curation/recommendation engines (movies, books, music, etc.) But even then, you just need to know people's backlogs and basic demographics, you don't need to start snooping on their web browsing behavior.

The devil in the detail is how well the targeting is done.

Is there a big difference between poor targeting & untargeted? Not really.

Is there a big difference between good targeting & untargeted? Massive amounts of data to say yes.

Note that ads can still be targeted, except that the article's context (or whatever the user is looking at) can be used instead of the user's profile and you're not violating anybody's privacy. And on the web this works great due to the long tail, available articles, movies, searches, etc. telling you a lot about what the user wants, without having to profile that user. It's not like on TV where the content has to appeal to a wide demographic, quite the contrary.

The problem with ad exchanges is that they are designed to violate the user's privacy by leaking user data on purpose, like the user's IP address and now with GDPR they rely on good actors, because the ad exchanges can't control who gets that data based on consent, with the threshold for vendors signing up being really low.

They were able to do this by analyzing purchasing patterns and according to the book were fairly successful.

I'd imagine that online tracking when combined with other sources of data provide a lot of insight into what customers are looking for and in some cases can provide a big payoff.

Even just a few hours of NYT ad traffic ought to be statistically significant enough to say that the difference is within a few percent.

The problem is that the data might not be _representative_. NYT traffic might behave differently enough from yours that their results don't apply to you.

Yeah, tracking probably throws the ads into a local minima. But ad algos don't care about conversion, they care about charging the ad buyer more.

Also, when I just bought some appliance online, maybe it's time to stop showing me ads for it on every page that I visit.

Virtually all google products are governed by a shared google privacy policy, which allows Google to combine data across products and services. This change was made years ago, despite some end user protest.

Most apps and products are also optimized to maximize data harvesting - ex. Android OS and Maps will nag if users don't give up data. So I don't really believe what you're saying.

It doesn't, except to the adtech targeters who want to muddy the water.

Ad targeting in this context means individualized targeting based on individualize tracking and data collection, full stop.

After all, it takes CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to run scripts and load images in the background. The difference is especially noticeable on mobile, and it's even worse when the scripts trigger redraws or mess with the scrolling.

Broad content-based targeting kind of targeting we or the GDPR is talking about. The issue here are individually targeted ads that are only possible with computerized ad delivery.

This is not the point of advertising at all. You’re operating on incorrect assumptions.

There are many different objectives of advertising. Imagine you’re in market for a vacuum. You might only be aware of a few brands, so other brands need to advertise so you become aware of their product. You may have forgotten about a brand that you previously liked, so they advertise. You might be considering one vacuum, but are potentially open to spending more on a premium model. You might be doubting the trustworthiness of a brand, until you seen them advertising on NYT. You might also need a new broom if you’re buying a new vacuum. What about this new product I invented, scented bags. How am I supposed to inform you about those?

But I've yet to see some actual controlled evidence showing clear data in terms of sales that we can be reasonably sure were generated by targeted advertising. I think such evidence probably does exist, I'm not saying I don't believe it just yet. But all the arguments here seem to confuse science with scientism--what we have is a lot of reasoning and academic explanations of how people think it works, which is just not the same as evidence. It doesn't matter if something sounds like the way it might work in real life, we have to make observations to call something data. I haven't seen much data here.

Its a not very well kept secret of internet advertising that it's so much more "measurable" than other types of advertising, but it's not actually measuring anything useful most of the time. There is the traditional quote that "I am wasting half my advertising budget, but I can't tell which half" With internet remarketing ads the answer might very well be both ;)

I honestly don't care why they show French ads, but you cannot call such things "targeted", if you cannot even get the language correct, out of a choice of either Dutch or English.

https://voxeu.org/article/short-run-effects-gdpr-technology-...

By itself? No, not at all. At least not more valuable than giving the same people the same money for doing nothing.

>What would you rather have people do?

Literally anything not actively harmful.

6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.

>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together.

Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a small guy and not having any targeting.

> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targeted ads.

This is not how it works.

If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your site -- right.

After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad networks with user cookie.

If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy. 5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.

If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go unmonetized.

>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.

nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target individual, just as in example above.

If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform, basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad-tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.

And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these days.

It says so right in the part of the article that was quoted:

“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities...

(the "he" is the NYT's SVP for global advertising)

Say like, combining their inventory into one source (say a supply side platform) and then offer that inventory to buy (say via an exchange).

So you're saying we should just take whatever Wall Street says as the truth, since only insiders can really understand?

I think sometimes insiders confuse "not taking an insider perspective" with being wrong or being unable to understand.

If you think they're missing something, find an good reporter (who can understand you, find alternative viewpoints and call you on any BS), then volunteer your testimony and experience to them.

They would be the ones making the ad, targeting someone X miles from them, who is interested in BMW's.

Car just won an award, which would direct him to look up more info about the car and why it's considered good.

Maybe they just made an update to the car model he likes, but is not aware of this change.

Combine this with marketers wanting to be more data-driven - and needing to report numbers to their own bosses - and you've got a situation ripe for exploitation. I expect the adtech companies could sell pretty much anything, as long as it smells like numbers.

> A wedding anniversary is a significant thing–some John's may be swayed by an advertisement, but many would consider it a bit of a cheat not to put more "novel" thought into it.

No idea what you mean here by cheating or novel thought. We're talking about whether knowing that info allows you to have more successful advertising compared to random chance. Serving John ads for roses, chocolates, and vacations will be more effective than serving those ads to a random person.

>Frankly, the former of those two data-points could mean anything. Much of what advertisers believe about consumer habits of single people could easily be correlation.

Correlation is the whole point. If someone who is single and goes to the gym is correlated to certain purchases or behavior, you can advertise those. And being single, a woman, and a gym-goer isn't super valuable by itself but combined together you can advertiser women's athletic clothing that is functional but also attractive.

> As for the latter, anyone with a daily gym routine is less likely to want to change it. Selling gym membership to someone speculatively hoping to start going to the gym is a better bet, but much harder to track.

Again, you don't understand advertising. If I know someone goes to the gym every day I'm not going to advertise gyms to them. I'm going to advertise water bottles, protein, healthy meal kits, athletic clothing, etc.

> Going back to the anniversary gift—I seriously doubt many people are much swayed by one-off ads in buying something as significant as a car

We're not selling Steve a car with targeted ads. We're taking his promotion and propensity towards bmw to assume hes wealthy and likes luxury goods. You advertise more expensive goods to him, rather than cheap ones.

You could, but mainly against things like billing practices and perhaps the necessity of certain procedures where there might be a conflict of interest.

It's a market targeting and opportunity cost question. Yes, many of Apple's consumers are probably high-priced wine consumers. And yes, winemaking is a profitable business. That doesn't mean, however, that Apple serves its interests by expanding into wine.

It's promising, though, that we now have data showing psychotic targeting practices are unnecessary. Perhaps, even inefficient.

    1) different television
    2) another television
    3) alternate listing of the same television and 4x the
       price because it's controlled by some idiot algorithm
    4) more television
    5) yet another television

Yeah, I was, you're right, I spent a couple of hours looking at car insurance stuff and now it's done for the year, so you're spending your advertising budget chasing people who are the absolute least likely to be interested...

Marketing spend is a proportion of GDP so it'll scale along with it, and is thus not zero-sum. As for regulation, that is needed in the industry and why we have limits on certain categories.

Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.

I've seen some compelling case studies that it does work, and even at low conversion % for big-ticket items (like hotels etc) it's insanely cost effective.

I'm no web dev, but couldn't sites use the HTTP header `Accept-Language` to pick appropriate ads?

Besides, as other commenters have pointed out, there is no concrete evidence that targeting individual users is any better (in terms of bringing in more sales) than targeting the combination of region, language, website topic, and on-page keywords.

If you're so worried about the sustainability of European ad agencies, maybe you should stop fearmongering and start trying to improve contextual targeting technology to such an extent that it provides even more value to your customers than behaviorally targeted alternatives. If and when GDPR-like regulations arrive in other parts of the world -- I'm pretty sure the noose is getting tighter in the U.S. as well -- your European agency will be in a perfect position to grab market share there.

If you are a smaller publisher, unless you get particularly active in courting advertisers (i.e. spend time going into sales), the niche advertisers will never even look at your content. The 20-something digital ad manager has no motivation to risk his job doing speculative ad spend. As a result your ads are less relevant and your inventory’s CPM drops as a result.

If you are a large property, then tracking affects you less (in fact tracking might be worse for you). Large publishers already have sales and marketing teams and ad managers will just choose you because you are “safe”. If brands are moving to a world where tracking data is less and less reliable, then by default they will move to spending more money on a smaller amount of “safe” inventory

The two sides see "off target" quite differently. If the baseline is 0.1% accuracy, and an ad platform offers 1% accuracy, then you see relevant ads showing up at 1 in a 100 rates rather than 1 in a 1,000 rates. You still feel like you're being spammed by useless nonsense. As an advertiser, my cost to reach my audience just dropped by 90%.

But probably the truth is that these systems aren’t that good :)

It is more typical to italicize a blockquote, perhaps with leading `>` to mark it out:

> like this

- and this is a list-item

- and so is this

it's just a matter of courtesy to those using smaller screens and assistive technologies

Thanks!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Plays x game on y website at z time of the days however should tell you something though.

Its the unsolicited tracking/stalking of individuals across communication networks GDPR forbids.

https://i.imgur.com/XROwES3.png

It's a list making fun of Amazon's stupid duplicate product recommendations and you don't need to scroll horizontally to get that out of it.

Screenshot from an iPhone SE which is a damn small viewport by 2019 standards.

It doesn’t and it isn’t.

You’re waxing poetic about simple hypocrisy.

If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised.

I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band.

A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!)

Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come.

Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me.

What the heck, Gooogle!?

When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

It's clearly confused, and so my wonder is how do they correct that over time? How do you un-scramble a scrambled machine learned profile? Can you even detect that it's gone awry?

They are very efficient in telling people that are intending to buy your product that they are going to buy your product. Or even buy your advertised product on the website that you're advertising.

They are not efficient in acquiring new customers, as most(90%+++) of the ad impressions go to the people that are already aware about your product.

The only truly efficient ad targeting is restricted by geography, culture, age and timezone.

It's that there was a thriving core decades ago that supported a fraction of the people the software industry supports today.

> Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.

All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has never experienced the moments ads go away.

No industry, let alone some niche in tech, would be unaffected if Google and their ad-revenue driven efforts dried up tomorrow morning.

If you can't see that there is plenty fewer things to do for the economy to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.

The Software industry would retract almost to the point of death relative to its current size without ads.

It is at the very least extremely nontrivial and not at all straightforward, even if everyone agrees it's not ideal. I'm not asking you to "cry about the deals of immoral industries" - rather as a pragmatist, I'm asking you to consider that unless we have a concrete way forward, suggesting to kill the industry is not productive.

Categorically speaking, advertising as a problem has several notable properties:

1. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is harmful (contrast with e.g. murder),

2. Reasonable people can disagree about how harmful it is (contrast with e.g. financial fraud),

3. It enables a significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of growth in the tech sector, which itself has empowered the lion's share of economic growth in the past decade,

4. There are few opportunities even within tech which will both pay comparably and which are not either directly or indirectly funded by advertising profits. Of those opportunities, some (such as fintech) are similarly disagreeable to another subset of the population.

The state of the world we live in is such that problems with these characteristics cannot be realistically solved by reducing or taking away the livelihoods of people who enable the problems to exist. I'm not telling you to not care about the problem. I'm also not telling you it can't be fixed. But I am telling you that you can't be so cavalier about what solving the problem entails if you actually want it to change.

Privacy is also not incompatible, as even choosing the NYT to advertise on is still a targeted decision, and advertising will never die unless you entirely replace the economic system we have. We might get some better online ad practices but it certainly won't happen by just calling it all "evil", which is especially ironic considering what evil actually exists in the world.

Anyways, by your dismissals it's clear you are only interested in irrational tirades which is unfortunately very common when discussing adtech so I'll end it here.

I don't think so.

A human would understand context. AI isn't supposed to be simple string matching.

The argument that you can't fight evil industries, because there are people who depend on them, will never be a convincing one.

And yes, if you think spying on everyone on the internet on a massive scale is fine, I do not consider you reasonable.

I bought a Dyson last summer. Amazon is still suggesting that I buy more vacuum cleaners.

I browsed retailers to copy the specs into my ad.

Who cares if you need to lie a little bit, right?

So, they would take your recent purchases, clicks, searches and wish listed products and recommended products from some accessory category or related products. ie. Traditional mining combined with heuristics.

It also helps to have separate widgets for similar products and for cross-sell products.

I'm one if those "advertising doesn't affect me" people. Except, then I realised that advertising acts subconsciously and uses human psychology against us, and I'm not as immune as I thought.

I buy a Dyson, every ad I see for vacuums is a Dyson, it confirms I made the right choice, everyone is buying them, they're everywhere, etc.. Everytime I see a shiny new vacuum it's a chance for my brain to compare it with the old rubbish one; why are all those people "enjoying" vacuuming when I have to suffer it.

With polo shirts it's like "these new ones look smart/fashionable/etc." vs the old one.

Yes there is likely a lag in "this person was looking for ..." signals; but I still don't buy (heh!) that as _entirely_ silly.

>Once I buy a car, or a television, I'm probably not going to be in the market for another one for years. //

Car, probably, depends on the person's wealth; TV, I've v heard people say "we liked it so much we got another one for our bedroom" or whatever.

FWIW I'd never buy a Dyson ...

What you need are complementary goods. These people bought coffee bean grinders? Show them ads for travel mugs, for high-end coffee subscriptions, and fancy grinder-cleaning brushes.

There's a difference between "Only one room left!" and "We only have one room left!"

It's called lying.

On one occasion, I've tried booking straight from the hotel, it told me no rooms available for the selected dates. I've tried Booking, and sure enough, that same room I had my eyes on was available.

If you do a broad search on OTA website, then you're likely to book the same hotel that you stayed last time... Thus pushing it up is a great way of getting you to book... But that depends on how much the hotel is contributing in marketing

I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics.

Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.

The only thing Google can provide is slight refinements on which political book to suggest — which isn’t far enough above the noise floor to matter. Anything else is just them giving the NYT statistical fuzz to pretend carrying their ads on beef jerky isn’t an all-around negative so they can fleece advertisers.

Targeted advertising isn’t about efficiency, it’s about raising the number of places they can (uselessly) place beef jerky ads so as to increase their cash flow.

> Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.

I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I think targeted ads is the biggest con no of our age.

I have been running my online business for 5 years now. I learn (and keep learning) all I need to know from the same, high quality source.

I get targeted all the time by adds on landing pages, email funnels, Facebook ads, etc. Some of these are legit, but thanks to my experience I can see that most of them are of poor quality.

They will never sell me anything, while they might sell something to someone that hates his job and is looking for another way to make money.

I think a message's context matters - and this is almost self evident from examples like ads for airline tickets being shown on plane crash articles. I think targeting is great, I really do, but I think the value of trusted brands is likely just as, if not more, strong.

If context matters, and I think that argument was the entrenched idea pre-internet and has not been disproven, then where is the positioning of targeting? My hypothesis would be that targeting is likely best utilised when people stray from self selecting brands, e.g. NYTimes needs no targeting, but a smaller publication likely does, as people aren't there for the brand's known positioning, but because of their targetable interests, e.g. they ended up on a site about coding, or computer games, or knitting or whatever.

If true, that would be easy for an ad network to detect. If the click through rate for ads on a topic not matching the users interests (as determined be browsing history) are higher, then your theory is correct.

It's basic stuff, and I'm sure they already do that.

When someone stops visiting your site, make sure to send them a email. Ask them to return! You have their email address, right?

I can't even imagine the outrage that would happen if it emerged that Google was using its access to people's emails to measure ad effectiveness.

For Google and Facebook it doesn't make sense, but for a newspaper i would expect some selection on the ads they show.

Except that they do have a choice.

Suppose there are five competitors. Everybody knows Steve is going to buy a BMW 3 Series. The margin is $5000. Assuming everyone else is going to do what you're going to do, how much does it make sense to bid to advertise to Steve? If you bid $1000, you have a one in five chance of making a $5000 margin. If you bid $5000, you have a one in five chance of making $5000.

So the optimal amount to bid is $0, because you have the same one in five chance at $5000 if everyone bids $0 than if everyone bids $1000 or $5000, but then you have a $1000 expected value rather than a $0 or $-4000 one.

Now suppose the others aren't using the same utility function as you and so may bid a different amount and you get a bidding war. So the first thing that happens is somebody bids $100 expecting to make $5000 -- bully for them, until the second one bids $200. Everyone raises their bid to $1000 because that's what a 20% chance at $5000 is worth. If one of the competitors drops out, the others will raise their bid to $1250 because now it's a 25% chance.

Which means there's never any profit in it for the advertiser. If anybody plays then at least one competitor will retaliate and everybody loses a total of $5000 to the ad platform. If nobody plays, everybody gets an expected value of $1000. Being the first to quit costs you nothing, but being the first to play costs you and each of your competitors $1000. Who is going to play this game?

If I have a $20 margin, I am better off giving Google $15 and getting an incremental $5 profit than not advertising. Even worse if my customers have a lifetime value of $50 it may make sense to give Google $45 and not see a return from my spend until years down the road while Google gets the $45 right now.

Where are the customers gonna end up?