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Comment by night-rider | Hacker News Reader

Yet targeted ADs get it wrong. A lot. I’m male and still get ADs for tampons in Facebook and YouTube. Google and Facebook have a whole decade of my browsing history and still can’t infer I’m male.

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FB/Google/etc. don't actually need to make correct inferences, they just need to provide infographics that say they are correct so that marketing departments can report to their superiors that they are responsibly spending advertising dollars and getting "impressions" from the right people

it's a multi-tier confidence game

$hasCervix: falsey

not only is it multi-tier, it's circular: FB/Google/etc marketing depts eat the same dogfood when it's served back to them

hence stuff like this https://www.memo.co

(note the Google endorsement if you scroll down)

and since Big brand advertisers (that can't calculate ROI) are the biggest spenders, most ad dollar can not be attributed to purchasing behavior reliably and thus wasted. (queue the ebay 100% wasteful ad story)

They also just need to provide enough stimulus to the users to keep them engaged. Whether that means posting, commenting, or just refreshing their feed, the end result is a) the user counts as active and b) the user is contributing, for free, to the overall content that gives the userbase as a whole a reason to keep coming back.

The 'secret' I learned from AdTech is that while the social media companies do need, to some extent, to be able to show their customers that buying ads provides value, what the social media companies need for themselves is just to keep the users engaged and coming back, generating content (posts and comments) for free so that there are pages in which to place ads and generate impressions.

They probably can, but they prefer not to make it too obvious.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...

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