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Comment by malwrar | Hacker News Reader

You don’t necessarily need to implement bidding on a dedicated slot—-the TV comparison assumes you’re sending the same thing to each user. This isn’t TV though, you can display different ads to different people of you wanted.

How about a system where probability of seeing an ad is weighted by how much money an advertiser pays? Then you just normalize across bidders and choose on that curve. Then perhaps the time slots just serve as a bucket to allow advertisers to approximate their target audience, perhaps there are additional buckets for things like geolocation.

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If you're bringing in those buckets, you are already in the slippery slope bringing you to the current system. Why not a bucket for people who visit the site often? A bucket for people using advanced site feature A, feature B? A bucket for people who subscribe to /r/teen?

Because the buckets are only time slots. If you can predict what time your highly focused market is to be online the most, good on you, but it doesn’t involve collecting any additional data.

I don't see any issue with a site using their own data to provide targeted advertisement on that one site. As long as data isn't being aggregated between sites and users aren't being tracked between sites, the privacy risk seems minimal.

Fair enough. Although if that site is Reddit, that includes a lot of information about my preferences for many things.

The problem with any model where ad performance is based on how much cash you can throw down is that scams are much more profitable typically than legitimate services. A scam page can afford $5/click if it's scamming 1% of its clicks for $5000. Bidding on clicks is just a race to the bottom in terms of quality.

We should instead be using user metrics to evaluate and punish ads that lead to pages users regret navigating to.

But, then we'd need to track users even more deeply, right?

We would need to model regret which is a questionable request to agree to “solve”.

Not really imo -- like I said upvotes and downvotes can do this just as well. Just have to have good anti-bot protections on that

The solution to that is right at the start of this thread:

> "Never allow dynamic ad content! Ads should be individually approved by publishers and not subject to change after approval."

That does not prevent scams

Traditionally, publishers didn’t mind publishing ads for scams like sea monkeys or x-ray specs, but they found it embarrassing and put them in the back of the book in small print. The bizarre part of the internet is that the scams go on the homepages of sites.

In that case it's just in the hands of individual publishers, so results will vary. Plus publishers will make more money if they _don't_ do the right thing and police out the bad ads (at least in the short term).

I think you're conflating two points - the granularity of targeting and the auction method. Everything will get simpler if you reduce the number of targeting variables. The auction method seems less relevant to me, that's simply a financial matter.

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