Re:Pale Moon blocks AdNauseam extension
by baybal2 on Sunday August 27, 2017 @07:27PM
(#15113388)
People have incorrect idea about intrusive surveillance by ads companies and its purpose. Personally identifiable data is of little importance to Goog and co. today, but is for arbitrage guys and other bottom feeders.
I worked for years as a webdev with mid-tier ad nets until last ones of them either went out of business or turned into niche players. We worked with "cube data" of people that had over 160 different parameters back in 2012-2013. The amount of data about an average internet user is huge, but nearly all of it is useless for a top tier ad player.
Google and few remaining top tier players take their "tax" on all kinds of ads that go through their platforms regardless of targeting efficiency and conversion rates. That is a lion share of value you can squeeze from a click. They let other "platform partners" to fight for remaining scraps. If DSPs and SSPs bring more clients and clicks or can somehow improve on the process, top tier players will only benefit from higher volumes.
However, the personally identifiable data sold by data vendors is of immense value to people running arbitrage schemes on ad exchanges. See, if you can price shows just few percents better on average than the rest of the ecosystem you make a lot of money. You bid for "garbage impressions (that's the industry's term)" in hopes to get expensive clicks for stuff like financial crap, RX, lawyers, amazon, "quasi-CPA" tagged clicks, and so on.
This type of business attracts a lot of rich "idle rentier" types. Naturally, those guys tend to "vote with their money," if they see that a certain arbitrage scheme is no longer profitable, and another one is. This is why there is so much of contention about such data, and cutthroat efforts to get it. I knew not one, but two RTB arbitrage collectives in Russia that had their RTB trading servers stolen from secure datacentres.
I worked for years as a webdev with mid-tier ad nets until last ones of them either went out of business or turned into niche players. We worked with "cube data" of people that had over 160 different parameters back in 2012-2013. The amount of data about an average internet user is huge, but nearly all of it is useless for a top tier ad player.
Google and few remaining top tier players take their "tax" on all kinds of ads that go through their platforms regardless of targeting efficiency and conversion rates. That is a lion share of value you can squeeze from a click. They let other "platform partners" to fight for remaining scraps. If DSPs and SSPs bring more clients and clicks or can somehow improve on the process, top tier players will only benefit from higher volumes.
However, the personally identifiable data sold by data vendors is of immense value to people running arbitrage schemes on ad exchanges. See, if you can price shows just few percents better on average than the rest of the ecosystem you make a lot of money. You bid for "garbage impressions (that's the industry's term)" in hopes to get expensive clicks for stuff like financial crap, RX, lawyers, amazon, "quasi-CPA" tagged clicks, and so on.
This type of business attracts a lot of rich "idle rentier" types. Naturally, those guys tend to "vote with their money," if they see that a certain arbitrage scheme is no longer profitable, and another one is. This is why there is so much of contention about such data, and cutthroat efforts to get it. I knew not one, but two RTB arbitrage collectives in Russia that had their RTB trading servers stolen from secure datacentres.