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Comment by leeoniya | Hacker News Reader

if it weren't for CDNs, simply blocking all 3rd party domains is the fastest, most reliable and secure way to block ads and greatly reduce bandwidth.

i highly recommend running both uMatrix and uBlock Origin. then whitelist cdns on a per-domain basis.

with the amount of tech and data available these days, google still chooses to show me an ad for chevy on an ice cream site. the fact that the ads are so obviously out of context is truly baffling - does this seriously work for the general consumer? even if i've searched for chevy before, why would i suddenly exit my ice cream experience?

if ads were contextually better, less distracting and less bandwidth/perf impactful, i may actually be convinced to view them. unfortunately none of these things are true.

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> with the amount of tech and data available these days, google still chooses to show me an ad for chevy on an ice cream site. the fact that the ads are so obviously out of context is truly baffling - does this seriously work for the general consumer? even if i've searched for chevy before, why would i suddenly exit my ice cream experience?

The point of that particular ad is likely less to get you to click and more to remind you that Chevy exists and is important. So when you go buy that new or used car, Chevy goes through your mind at least once, and you subconsciously have some trust in the brand because you are reminded of its existence through various outlets on a daily basis, which is naturally comforting when done correctly.

It’s not really any different from seeing a Tide laundry detergeny commercial while watching South Park. What’s tide got to do with a cartoon, and are you going to run out immediately and buy some Tide during the break? No, but next time you go to the store to buy detergent you’ll see Tide and while you might not buy it you’ll at least be familiar with it in a relatively positive manner, which for most will make the chances of them buying it higher.

except that i researched chevy thoroughly and decided that it sucked. now i have to go and purge what google thinks it knows about me. and theoretically repeat this process for every other ad network, but this is neither possible nor practical.

Point is, you researched Chevy heavily.

Not everyone is going to buy Chevy but almost everyone is going to research Chevy. The role of Chevy ads being shown to everyone plays a role in this. So a Chevy ad still is “relevant” even on an ice cream site.

ads can serve as a great discovery mechanism. instead, they're this annoying parrot that continuously yells at you about shit you've already seen and researched or some other unchanging highest bidder. fwiw, facebook, has recently surprised me with its ad relevance on a few occasions.

no thanks.

Hum... The GP is almost certainly seeing those Chevy ads because he researched it. Not the other way around.

That's how tracking ads (don't) work. You usually get ads for things you just brought (or decided not to), hoping that you didn't actually buy it yet or will buy more than once, and the medium can intermediate the transaction.

> except that i researched chevy thoroughly and decided that it sucked

Time for a re-decision. Expect to see those ads for years to come. How does a 2019 cherry-red Corvette sound?

> with the amount of tech a d data

This blows my mind. The ad industry has basically taken three steps backwards in a time with incredible analytics. Google, Facebook etc have drunkenly ruined and inundated their targets to the point people outright mentally adblock

Except all their internal metrics show the exact opposite when it comes to engagement, lower CPAs, higher CTRs, etc. Just because you personally think it's worse doesn't mean it's statistically worse across their entire userbase. FB didn't become a $500bn company in spite of being bad at optimizing their ads business, they became a half-a-trillion dollar company precisely because they are very very good at that.

I completely agree that they are clearly successful, I was mostly stating my opinion of the low quality of advertising. The ads might be engaging but that doesn't mean they are generally useful or relevant.

Hell most ads barely bother to state a purpose. they rely on the "shiny" factor

Nearly half of Facebook's advertisers are buying on a CPA metric tracked back to purchases on their site, so it's hardly just a shiny factor.

Can you please provide a link? I am genuinely curious because the ads I currently see are dubious at best.

I can’t find the FB specific data right now, but here is some old industry trend data: http://www.nanigans.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/US-Digita...

You can kind of suss this out of their 10k by looking at their cost of sales which is much stronger than companies like Twitter who rely more heavily on brand ad sales (direct response ads generally have lower sales overhead than brand ads since they are more commonly bought on a self-serve basis, even by advertisers with very high budgets)

One reason your ads may be bad on FB is if you use an ad blocker. FB uses a lot of signal from third party websites for targeting and if your ad blocker is blocking the FB pixel from loading you are blocking some of the most common data (conversion tracking data, product interest data) used to target high-value ads.

You are overthinking it so much. It's all about just shoving that brand name or product reminder in front of you as often as possible, wherever they can. Eventually you might click the ad and give them .002 cents of revenue, or you might even click through and buy that new car for $30,000! Before I installed AdBlock, I myself constantly saw ads for eBay items I've looked at, and I see them on all sorts of websites. I've also found that certain T-shirt websites are particularly persistent. And even when I unblock ads on certain sites, as I've done on about 40, I'll see the eBay ads again.

Blocking 3rd party domains isn't enough. Especially when there is tons of advice to link to Google fonts, and 3rd party libraries instead of your own. Also when a bunch of websites are using AWS/Cloudfront URLs for things like loading images and in some cases ads may hide behind those as well.

> [...] when a bunch of websites are using AWS/Cloudfront URLs for things like loading images [...]

You missed this part:

> if it weren't for CDNs, [...]

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