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Comment by TrevorJ | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue with ads on youtube is the gross misapplication of targeting.

Where I live, it's been nothing but the same negative political attack ads for the last 4+ months. It's gotten to the point that I want to NOT vote for any of these people because I've heard the same ad from them 50+ times to the point of annoyance.

Google, is of course happy to take your ad dollars and let you alienate your potential customers all day long, which is a broken model in and of itself.

Nobody would think it was a good idea for a company to buy EVERY ad block during an NFL game and run the same ad in each, but that's exactly what is happening with targeted ads on youtube now.

In theory, with appropriate targeting, I should see stuff that I'm actually interested in, or care about. If anyone can do that, it would be google. Issue is, they leave it up to the advertiser and in most cases it would seem that the entities running the campaigns are not competent.

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> Where I live, it's been nothing but the same negative political attack ads for the last 4+ months.

Its been much the same with broadcast TV where I live.

> It's gotten to the point that I want to NOT vote for any of these people because I've heard the same ad from them 50+ times to the point of annoyance.

Political attack ads are intended to make you not want to vote for people. Political ads that are intended to make you want to vote for people aren't attack ads.

This is not because Youtube is mistargetting, it is because political campaigns are deliberately (perhaps mistakenly, or perhaps because they have a really good understanding of the overall effect of doing that on the behavior they care about then) conducting saturation campaigns through a variety of media channels.

> In theory, with appropriate targeting, I should see stuff that I'm actually interested in, or care about.

That assumes you are paying for the targeting. If the advertisers are paying for the targeting -- which, to be clear, they are -- then with "appropriate targeting" you will hear what someone wants you to hear about. Now, with typical commercial targeting, there is a considerable overlap between what people want you to hear about and what you want to hear about. That's less true with political advertising, and especially less true with political attack ads.

"Political attack ads are intended to make you not want to vote for people. "

Are you saying attack ads are actually designed to keep you away from the polls altogether? That's what the OP was getting at, I think.

> Are you saying attack ads are actually designed to keep you away from the polls altogether?

That's usually an acceptable result, yes. They are intended to make you not vote for the target of the attack. Usually, the people behind them have some other candidate that they'd rather you vote for then not voting at all -- but getting you to do that isn't the point of the attack ad. Attack ads are popular in the US (with its ubiquitous use of duopolistic first-past-the-post voting) elections because getting people to not vote for your opponent (even if it means not voting at all) is itself a viable route to victory.

> Google, is of course happy to take your ad dollars and let you alienate your potential customers all day long, which is a broken model in and of itself.

There's an option[1] when you're setting up a video ad to stop an ad from showing to a person more than x times per {day,week,month}. If the advertiser doesn't bother using such functionality it's their fault, not Google's

[1] http://i.imgur.com/ckIZZFI.png

Agreed - though that does support my position as stated :)

It's accepted wisdom that election ads only work with repetition. So I suspect the targeting is perfect.

For certain (acceptable) values of perfect. I'm in California but for just a year, so I'm not a citizen or anything. I see 2-3 unskippable 30 second political ads each night and while ads have never driven me away from online streaming before, these are actually pushing me away from youtube.

"In theory, with appropriate targeting, I should see stuff that I'm actually interested in, or care about."

It would be nice if we had the power to veto certain advertisements.

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