Uhhhhh how about don't read emails? If I have a fantasy football team, please sell me football stuff. If I click on an article relating to health concerns, sell me organic whole foods stuff.
Can you imagine someone 20 years ago throwing all your mail into a scanner and saying, "don't worry I'm only checking for keywords and receipts"?
It seems to me that programmatic ads are popular mainly because it's easier to measure engagement, not because it's more profitable for publishers, then at some point Google and Facebook got the advantage of network effects.
Or even more weird, for products you already bought and are unlikely to buy again.
I don't fully understand why they continued after seeing clickthrough numbers go down across the board. I guess it's easier to sell the concept; only show this ad to people who have already seen this product but they are usually late with the message. If I'm looking at something today chances are by next week/month I have already decided to buy or move on. How many engagement rings can one buy?
An ad for it followed me for weeks.
I didn’t have one too few, I had one too many.
I was the worst possible customer for that ad.
I also thought this is something Duck Duck Go could implement to distinguish itself. It will result in a better experience for advertisers as clicks would be pre-qualified. It's the counter-move to Google's "quality score" which, when you think about it (or actually do advertising), is anti-pre-qualification.
What I mean is this: If people are just looking for information (free) and not wanting to buy, then if I put something in my ad that discourages people from clicking (by putting in a price, for example), then I get less clicks-per-display and my quality score goes down. However, only displaying these ads to people who are looking to buy would negate that.
And what do you mean not publicizing it? It is quite visible on the ads they show it for.
If the other methods could target you technically, they would
Yes, it helps. Contextual ads help me find new customers to market to, hopefully through relevant content that overlaps with my product, but what do I do with all those visitors that stop by and don't convert? Retargeting lets me capture that interest and incrementally improve my media spend - and on tens of millions a year in media spend, this can be significant.
I wish I had better alternative but unfortunately these are the tools we have to work with, and creepy ads that follow you around the internet are going to last until we figure out better ways of spending investor money without feeling like we're burning cash to the Advertising Gods.
It feels like we are wasting so much page space with ineffective ads and too few clickthroughs.
- Game recommendations on Steam and other platforms.
- Highlighted apps on the App Store.
- Before the internet, games and apps in magazines.
Everything else that I have ever spent money on, I have discovered through word of mouth (including places like Reddit or HN), searched for it myself, seen it incidentally in the wild (e.g. hearing a song outside or seeing someone using something) or when browsing shops and stores in person.
How often do other people here remember buying something they saw in an ad (that they didn't already know of)?
Regarding ads on the internet, I really see very few anymore. The ad-blocking and privacy options for browsers seem to be exceedingly good at their job, and I automatically switch to reader view for any page that enables it. These days I am surprised to see an ad online.
I rarely ever watch cable but I swear cable ads would repeat the same exact video ad multiple times per show but maybe it has changed nowadays.
> Why is it that way? Is it really more profitable,
Probably depends on the product. For google search where your search query is generally highly relevant to what you are looking for and therefore advertisers, probably not much. For facebook when I am scrolling through the news feed and I'm not looking for any product in particular, probably a lot because that is the difference between showing me a generic ad with low click through rates versus one that is tailored towards things I probably want and therefore much more likely that I will click on it.
It is. Online, you can use statistics and probability theory to actually test what's more profitable instead of relying on ad-hoc metrics about what "feels good".
> They chase you around the web, even for products you already decided you didn’t want
These are a small minority of online ads. They're displayed in places where nothing more profitable or contextual can be displayed. (I.e., most websites, since most websites are junk.)
If I'm looking at x, selling me something that makes x easier or otherwise compliments x makes a lot more sense than selling me something that I looked at 2 months ago and didn't intend to buy.
Yes, and actually Acxiom is a lot more powerful and comprehensive than your postulation, if you care to look into them.
Unregulated data mining is, in my opinion, going to lead to the next collapse of culture. The cow is already out of the barn and it's on the way to Chicago. I don't think it's an unfair analogy considering the experiments thus far in totalitarian environments.
Kind of refutes the claim that it's just like showing specific emails with date/times to the general public.
https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-s...