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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

If I'm reading an article about the pandemic, I probably don't want to see ads selling me face masks. If I'm reading an article about the inauguration, I probably don't want ads selling me inauguration t-shirts.

I am however more likely to click on ads selling me home renovation stuff because they know I've recently bought something in Home Depot. Even though I'm not currently on a home renovation website.

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The most effective ads on me, in terms of intentional click through rate (not going to count predatory clicks) are contextual ads on specialized sites. This doesn't work well for general stuff like news sites, but webcomics that do their own ads, or a super focused forum like candlepower or head-fi? Contextual ads are ideal there.

Second most effective are platform-specicic hypertargeted ads, such as Facebook ads. Lot of misses there too, but their first party targeting is good to the point of actually giving me some interesting content.

In practice the third party "contextual" ads mostly are misses for me. Wow, another ad for the home improvement thing I either researched and bought last month, or that I was looking up on a whim and don't have any intention of actually purchasing.

I have never clicked on an ad and bought something.

Ok you are extrapolating your experience to millions of others in the world. Nothing wrong with that but it isn’t going to give you universal insights since you’re a special case.

Almost nobody clicks on an ad and buys something based on that. Conversion is a pipe dream, and ad rates are never based on actual click-throughs.

Neither did anyone watching an ad on television, it's not just about click-through rate.

Maybe some articles just shouldn't have ads at all. That would be refreshing. Sites publishing ad-supported content obviously need to put the ads somewhere, but that doesn't mean every single article needs its own revenue stream to justify its existence.

I agree - that’s a whole separate argument though. If the argument is contextual vs personalized, personalized wins imo

You've just given two bad examples, contrasted with one good example, to prove your point. Pick a good example of a contextual ad and a bad example of a personalised ad (there are many) and the proof is reversed.

Except that my example is more the more popular scenario. Pageviews of general news site surpass pageviews of niche websites about a specific topic. Just go look at the top visited websites.

Right but your example is still intentionally bad, no one is going to put an inaugration t-shirt ad as the contextual ad for a news article. An ad on a general news site can be related to the preferences of the readership of that paper, like how it always worked in print. Or it can even be targeted based on information about you that is gathered first-party, from the patterns in your use of the news website.

I totally agree. But that probably won’t involve programmatic/traditional advertising. It will probably involve first party ads. Which I am definitely in favor of!

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