Needless to say, product still folded in the end.

Look at companies like Facebook and Google. They thrive on advertising, and despite that and having a myriad of other ethical issues, plenty of people consider these companies to be some of the most desirable to work for in the world.

How many Facebook and Google employees read threads like these and feel even the smallest pang of guilt? What percentage of those will actually take action based on what they know is right, quit, and go work for more ethical companies?

There's a reason the internet is a cesspool of advertising. Most people would rather have a big fat paycheck than do what they feel is right, if they even feel that what they do is wrong.. which I bet most people who work for these companies don't.

And yes that's out of about 900 people who bought. But only about 100 used even once, and only about 40-50 maybe used meaningfully, ever, so these customers almost don't churn.

That's from memory, and I don't remember who said it, so I can't give credit where due. But I think it's a great description of what you're saying - that ads are killing our self esteem and self image.

That's because there is a mismatch between what advertisers want to sell and what the people want to buy. Your topics of interest don't pay for them, so they shove something else in your pages in the hopes of making a conversion.

:)))

I'm astounded that YouTube has spent billions of dollars over a decade on the best software engineers and still cannot manage this simple optimisation.

It took six months for the company to ask someone to investigate further; he confirmed my estimation and had “the most impact anyone junior had within two months of joining the company”.

If they hit a couple of lone gringos and other ex-pats, whatever; the point is a wide net. Targeting you specifically isn't worth the trouble until your net worth is measured in 5MM or more, me thinks.

What’s important is that YouTube had another user to show ads to thereby inflating their metrics so they can sell more ads at a higher price.

Ads aren’t about you, they’re about convincing marketing departments to spend more money on more ads at a higher price.

Ads can be targeted to context, not user - web developer ads on JavaScript blogs.

Ad profiling and targeting can be done client side.

Users' could opt in to what they are targeted for to ensure it is the relevance they want. You will often find ad tracking technology on some very privacy invasive websites. I've seen it on HIV support, rape support, prayer, single parent dating, cancer advice, alcoholism, political party membership pages and many more; even tracking military intelligence recruitment. Are the relevant ads and infosec risks for these topics good for the user?

Tackling anonymised delivery and fraud prevention is a problem, but it's something that can be overcome with accepting it already happens and then minimising it through privacy respective methods like using auditors and testing, copying anonymisation protocols (maybe Tor), payment style validation (Brave?, zerocoin) and server side metrics.

So much this. I would turn my adblock off, if I had a directory with checkboxes/weights against interesting product topics. I would even browse the topics themselves regularly, as I did in google directory before it was gone. I (and the economy) want me to discover, not to hide from pushiest pushers around.

Modern marketing is just a slowpoke idiot who stalks me for two weeks after I already bought a <productname> via search.

Google’s system isn’t perfect but I can x-out individual ads. I’m hoping that Google will move away from a purely embedding-based targeting system into something more deliberate.

Facebook has [1] which is the closest to what you are asking for, although not used nearly enough to justify more investment in improving it.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

But the reason I started blocking trackers was because the ads from tracking were basically antirelevant. I would spend an afternoon investigating what model of a specific tool to buy and where, then I would go buy it. For the next month, all the ads were for that exact tool; at which point, I was probably the least likely person in England to actually respond to those ads.

And that was before the whole Cambridge Analytica thing. I have money and I like to buy cool and useful things, and "good" advertising helps me find cool and useful things to buy. But I definitely do not like the idea of being targeted for psyops.

Most ads have sophisticated analytics, and not only about individual users. That means, basically, that they wouldn't spend their money advertising this way if it wasn't working at all or if there was a more profitable way.

Also, if I'm on a subway and start "reminding" the people around me that their clothes are out of fashion and they can buy new ones at my shop, do you think that people would consider that as friendly? Would you?

The 'psyops' was related to Cambridge Analytica using hyper-targeted messages to affect the outcome of elections; see the "Do So" campaign designed to decrease Black voter turnout in Trinidad and Tobogo [1].

As I said, I don't mind finding out about cool things to buy. I definitely don't want to be sucked into misunderstanding and hating people, or being fooled into acting against my own interests.

[1] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2019/08/06/netflixs-the-great...

The “Do so” is a far better example of what they really did: develop a talent for race-based dog-whistle type messaging that _anyone_ could see but where one group would respond differently. The main differentiator that Cambridge Analytica would introduce was Social media vs. traditional press to split messaging by age-group. They tried to improve it using magazine subscription and car brand (from credit reports) but it wasn’t much better than using party registration datasets.

Now they are trying to create some magic algorithms to determine user interests and serve same ads everwhere, independent of current page context (including vacuum cleaner you bought last week, but maybe you need another?). But why they won't do the obvious thing, serving ads revelant to the page they are shown on..?

They pretty much do. Non-targeted ads will either require an unreasonable amount of effort to disseminate or they will not be relevant to the vast majority of people that see them. Contacting different sites about a specific topic to show your relevant ads is going to take an incredible amount of work.

What's probably even worse is if we get a situation like on YouTube, where it's just the same 5-10 companies buying ads for their products. This means that content creators will advertise NordVPN on their site, even if the product itself is bad, because you only have these few options to choose from.

I see a great opportunity here.

You absolutely can, the ad just needs to match the venue. If you are selling fishing tackle you buy an ad on Total Carp (a real magazine!) and you have guaranteed targeting to fishing enthusiasts. This is the same for any ad for any product.

The idea that tracking is needed for ad targeting is pure deception on behalf of those whose real objective is the tracking for other reasons.

But it's interesting that most people commenting here seem to loathe advertising. Can we really all be outliers?

Yes, absolutely.

People who have something to complain about will often do that waaaaaay in excess of people who don’t.

Compounded by HN tending to attract people who enjoy a text-only interface.

Within the past week, I've actually opted to watch more than one complete ad on YouTube, because it was relevant. (More to the channel than me, but interesting for the same reason that the channel itself was. Channel about making things, ads about high end (multi hundred thousand dollar?) CNC tools and the such.

This can even be generalized further. I am not a fan of targeted content anywhere if it goes beyond similar content that I recently watched.

The only context where ads don't leave a negative impression is while shopping. The way ads dominate topics if they happen to also match some random products name is infuriating.

But if ads must be played, just show the random content that you show everyone.

The ads were basically a fast slide show - they were changing frames so fast that I didn't even have time to see what the actors were doing. It seemed to be flashing - each frame had actors with different color clothes than the previous frame, there was no continuity. The audio was just as intense, lots of compression and high frequencies. A background narrator (salesman) was nearly shouting in a harried tone, bombarding me in their allotted 10 seconds with reasons I should do something. It was noise without rhythm.

Maybe this ad was the result of my friends automatically generated ad targeting profile and it reflected her search interests, demographic, digital purchase history, automated microphone/camera data collection, and location data history.

But it's also evidence that even the ones making the ads are probably bored with their own jobs (unless ads are automatically generated deep fakes by now).

I don't watch TV, but I'll go to public places where there are TVs playing and people in the room to respond to the content. A Dos Equis ad came up last week, father and son fishing sharing a meaningful moment that turned out to be the father telling the son that the glass beer bottle was recyclable for 5 cents in Iowa, Maine, and Georgia. The son says that means alot to him.

I really couldn't stop laughing for a good 45 seconds. And I remembered it. The pace of the ad was pleasant, gentle (which ultimately sets up the punch line), predictable, and had a format for television which means no skipping which translates to more thoughtful and competitive content (sports channels push 3-4 commercials in a row, YouTube interrupts you with one, maybe two). The room didn't feel like it was pulled into an unorganized frenzy for 10-20 seconds (though the channel will matter, this room was a casino sports betting room - there are so many TVs that I felt like I was sitting in Public Sentiment Mission Control).

But these ads are probably directed at people who have their hands on the controls, unlike hands free TV. A YouTube audience target is probably expected to be alone confined to their device, and the severity of the ad's information overload may reflect the high-bandwidth-internet-surfers reluctance to focus on one thing.

Chicken before the egg?

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/