> Rather, the only other scalable options are far worse.

Is it really worse than "this article is about X, Y is related, let's show some ads for Y"?

I bet from the point of view of the advertisement middlemen it is not. Because they capitalize mostly on showing ads of products that people already decided to buy or are very near deciding. But that is yet another racquet that only decreases the value of the industry. My question is, from the point of view of the real advertisers (the ones selling something), is it really worse?

Right but the advertising budgets for things actually related to articles or other media content are vastly dwarfed by the advertising budgets for unrelated things that actually make more revenue/profit.

So you'll end up having to try to monetize something that has little no no related things that are profitable to advertise.

> What are the marketers other choices?

Advertise on a tech site, 80+% will be interested in tech.

Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Far better than what, 5% ? This isn't rocket science, we sold everyones integrity for pennies.

> who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste.

No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

That would probably target dog enthusiasts or dog hobbyists or dog fanatics, which are all subsets of dog owners.

I think that one of the things that makes social media ad targeting so attractive to advertisers is that they can target the dog owners, instead of just the enthusiasts/hobbyists/fanatics.

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety.

But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach?

> No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.

What? Sure, they have campaigns running for awareness, recall, perception.

But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

Only google et al cares about scalability, everyone else cares about results. Only google needs to sell ads without any knowledge about the product or audience, this scales extremely well but leads to poor results.

> But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

When is the best time to sell the brand? When your flagship is a year old and still costs as much as on launch day and when the competition has surpassed you? Hardly.

People that has enough interest to use a dog-forum has too much knowledge of quality to buy things that a company advertises. They will know already what works for their dog and does not listen to advertising in the normal sense. They might however listen to bloggers that has been payed to talk about brands.

If you buy ads, you want them displayed to the non-fanatics that is not influenced by experience and vulnerable to brand exposure.

As long as the algorithms are close to or better than this model why would they bother? One is all automated and the other is a lot of work dealing with individual websites (even if it is just a matter of manual targeting settings)

I'd say they are much much worse, but they are scalable and cheaper so that kind of makes up for it.

But the only one who cares is the middleman. They are the only ones that benefit from the scale.

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Give me a list of dog community site to target 1 millions dog owners.

Now tell me how expensive it would be to show ads on theses websites.

Plenty of dog owners are on Facebook, much easier to target 1 millions dog owner there instead.

Did I forget to mentions that it's for a dog shop in Montreal? Good luck!

Looking at the hundreds of mostly incorrect or irrelevant demographics that Twitter has be in, I would still say there’s a huge amount of waste going on. At least with offline advertising (like TV or print) the “fuzziness” is very explicit. Here, Twitter sells you that you can target “dog owners”, but nowhere through the Twitter ad buy process does it tell you how BS that targeting is.

And that's why Twitter is not doing as well as Facebook. Facebook doesn't need algorithms to know what you are interested in, where you like to eat, etc. You explicitly tell them in your info and by what types of articles you like and share, and what you post.

Well I’ve told Twitter that I hate Blockchain and think it’s all BS, yet I still get ads for ICOs and “Uber for the blockchain” - whatever the fuck that is.

Again, I guess this is because Twitter sucks at advertising.

Twitter is the same, except even more-so. People tweet 10+ times a day, update FB status infrequently.

All the things FB has done to extract things like resturant data etc are product development they undertook. Twitter spent 10 years moving form 140 characters to 280 instead.

Even if that is true, when people sign up for Facebook, they fill out a bio telling FB their work history, their school affiliations, who their family members are, their hometowns and current cities, they check in where they are at, tell FB their favorite books, music, tv shows, thier gender, relationship status, thier sexual preference, and thier political party affiliation. Everyone doesn't fill out everything, but a lot of people do.

That's exactly my point.

There is no reason why Twitter couldn't have done the same 5 years ago. And no reason that they can't do it now.

(Also people are just as likely to follow and talk about things like tv shows and music and politics on Twitter as FB)

Plus the fact that they can also average your interests from information volunteered by your friends and family because "birds of a feather, flock together".

IOW, Twitter followers may be total strangers to many IRL, unlike Facebook followers.

Traditionally, it wasn't necessarily considered a waste to give people a positive feeling about your brand even if they weren't the specific ones who wanted to buy, because everybody talks to everyone else.

I think advertisers have been chasing a chimera via targeting, because not only doesn't it work well, but there is a trade-off to maintaining a brand.

I’ll tell you one thing that’d be better: prices and wages that make sense. I shouldn’t be faced with dozens of subscriptions just to lead basically the same life I did over a decade ago with half those subscriptions (or fewer). And being paid 5x what I made then shouldn’t feel like I’m making it work but not saving much. And I shouldn’t be getting sales calls over 4 months after having used TrueCar.