In Google settings I can choose my interests.

Of course Google knows better than me and would always completely disregard it, showing me ads for dating sites (most seemed unusually scammy) for 10 years after I married instead of showing ads for stuff I might need or be tempted to buy anyway:

- car parts (unless I have recently bought everything I need like today)

- computer/tech conferences

- family holidays, toys etc

Since Google only hires the best and brightest and let them work freely under the most inspiring conditions this must be a really great idea.

For those who don't catch it: this is soaked in sarcasm.

Edits: a bunch.

Let me also add that while Google ads often has great ROI[0 ] you should keep an eye on them. Google has annoyed me for ten years but I'm close to claiming they must have scammed a bunch of dating sites (or maybe just one company with a lot of fronts?)

[0]: although possibly less than before according to friends who used them to bootstrap a nice company.

> I buy (electronic) gadgets all the time. Parts for PCs, Raspberry Pis, Arduino, "smart" devices to replace "dumb" devices like light bulbs, power sockets, equipment for race/flight simulation, etc. and adverts were usually just for the latest nVidia card or some games or something. Then there was that ONE TIME I bought a unicorn dress for my (then 2yo) daughter and that's it: Nothing but unicorn shit advertised at me for the rest of my life.

and the reply was something like:

> The fact that FAANG has spent what must be billions on specialised/targetted advertising and still can never show us adverts for anything other than stuff _we've already bought_ reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted advertising in my lifetime.

and I have to say I agree.

Some time later I was in my closet and still pondering how Facebook could possibly be so wrong as to think I was interested in pants of all things. On a whim, I decided to count my pants. And you know what? I had a lot of pants. Triple digits. Way more pants than I realized I had and way more pants than any one person could possibly need. It turns out, I _was_ pretty interested in pants.

Facebook, without ever having seen my closet, had a better understanding of my wardrobe than I did.

I've even bought a few things I found through Facebook or Instagram ads, things that I wasn't aware of and that I enjoy, timeular and old school safety razors for example, proving that advertising can be a win-win game.

No, what they do is buy point-of-sale data from stores, often through companies like Nielsen and larger. NOW they know what you're buying, and Banana Republic ain't gonna stop telling them, because the market research aggregators pay them back by telling them who is buying their stuff, like people whose credit card usage is 45% directed at clothing stores.

It's far more likely that the Gap is uploading your itemized receipt data to advertising networks (complete w/ that email address they always ask you for and your CC info) under the guise of improving their own retargeting.

People can really freak the fuck out when you can predict what they need accurately. For example the real case of a store advertising specific baby items to someone who didn't know she was pregnant.

This is why "suggested items" often have one wildcard thrown in: They don't want you to realize just how much they really know you.

Of course this doesn't explain failures, but I wouldn't rule out smart ads just yet.

Meanwhile, the thing I might want, if only I knew about it? It's not on the front page; it's not on the hot or new pages; and it's not anywhere near the first page of results for any search I do. These are SEO death-zones, where I just see 1000 optimized contenders for the one boring highest-profit-margin product.

Instead, to find genuinely-interesting new products, I have to go into particular micro-categories, and then browse through ~20 pages of irrelevant same-y things to get past the micro-category's own SEO death-zone. (Even within e.g. the "Scientific Instruments" category, the first ten pages are all either N95 masks or brewing equipment, rather than, y'know, beakers and test strips and CO2 monitoring equipment and such. I know why—they don't re-rank per the browsing habits of the other people who've viewed a given category, but instead reuse the item's global rank in all categories it appears in—but it's still ridiculous.)

I mean, maybe I'm an outlier; I watch YouTube reviews of life-hack tools, kitchen gadgets, etc., so most "novelties" aren't all that novel to me. When I'm looking for "something I don't know about", I more mean "something that would excite me, but which nobody within my filter-bubble is excited about yet."

But surely an AI could deduce a ranking algorithm that would show people like me what they want to see, right? I feed it plenty of training data in terms of what I do and don't bookmark/save on the site. It just needs to think one level up from "tags" / "similar users."

And the weird thing is, I feed plenty of data on exact products I've been interested in in the past to every service I use. Like I said, I watch YouTube videos about e.g. knock-off portable game consoles; I search Google for those products, say things about them in Facebook Messenger, etc. I know I'm getting my privacy invaded by these services—the least they can do is to actually use that information to get me a "recommended" product listing for the thing I'm considering buying!

Advertisement systems are way less advanced and much more stereotype driven, than privacy freaks care to acknowledge. Think of this - advertisers have less than 100ms to decide the best ad to show you... often multiple times per website. Do you really think that any ads are actually personalised?

I remember having to differentiate between Bike Helmet for Barbie(a toy) and Barbie Bike Helmet(safety device for children)... Or the fact that if you let a learning algo run through the categories, they can place dildos(adult toys) right next to water guns(kids toys).

There are services that target you with offers that are highly tailored*, but online ads are not one of those services.

(Amazon's "You May also like", food delivery services suggestions, and similar things that can calculate for a long time)

Yes. Privacy freaks are overreacting on how deep ad tech cares to know about you. It's way less than what NSA or spying agencies(hello Facebook) are able to collect and use.

Even light speed is not infinite.

FAANG companies earn billions on targeted advertising, but it's up to the customer running the ads to do it effectively.

Google and Facebook don't particularly care what ads people are buying or if those ads are working.

The only thing which prevents this are incentives. Content provider are paid per click. Intelligent targeting would reduce clicks. Advertisers would have to pay more for intelligent targeting. So why not just keep the status quo?

On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily their intention, but they certainly decided to make that shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this action.

Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times.

Best and brightest, indeed.

There's one thing, though: no matter how good your recommendation algorithms are, if you only have shit to advertise, you'll only recommend shit.

My problem is less that the recommendation engine isn't good enough than that this industry is too large and too powerful, and I believe that it's existence is dangerous to society.

For instance, given the Snowden documents, I would give the odds that NSA isn't piggybacking on this private intelligence a very, very low value. How you feel about that is a function of your politics, but even if you think NSA is a good actor, it's not hard to imagine an intelligence agency you wouldn't appreciate gaining access to that information.

But a more mundane and realistic concern is just Google being a monopolizer. The other day they "helpfully" opted me in to their new meeting service and "helpfully" inserted a meeting link into my calendar. This caused me to be 10 minutes late to a job interview over Zoom - because I'd spent 25 minutes waiting in an empty Google Meeting! I'd just assumed the client used this service. (Luckily, they were understanding.) My personal frustrations aside, IANAL but that seems like the very definition of a monopolizing tactic, and I'm pretty sure that's illegal. If I'm wrong, then I submit that it should be.

It's not hard to imagine Google gaming the stock market, or to imagine malicious Googlers conducting insider trading. I'm sure the best and brightest could come up with more ingenious and more lucrative ways to abuse their position as well.

Seriously, why can't we say No Thanks to a company's ads and let them stop wasting our time and their money?

If I click the button to explain the ad, it tells me it's because of my age (I'm a young man) and time of day (I watch videos in the late evening.)

Which is certainly a profile that makes sense, in broad strokes. But no, these are not my interests.

(No judgement to people who like playing pornographic games and dating online! It's just rather inconvenient when I'm trying to watch YouTube videos with my family!)

That's the absolute wrong way to look at it.

There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to square one.

It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to twenty something with a smattering of mortgage offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a decision on which avenues to go down in order to further specialize.

I actually messed around with it once to figure out what it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really change their estimate of my age (or they just think that every male on the internet is into 20 somethings). They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made travel reservations.

Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense that Google would likely respond "You're using our service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it.

They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates with a mental Tink Tink as the great data hoarding monolith known as Google does it's damnedest to sell me something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the process.

And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes in the statistical voyeurism sense too!

This would be the single most impactful way to return the Net to a repository of valuable information.

Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in.

But how will websites stay up without advertising, you might ask?

I don't care. I host things I want out there. I find a way to account for it. If you want to present me first party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I'm okay with that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue maximization techniques.

Enough to just log in to Gmail or YouTube and you're back.

My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few things 'online', including email and basic searching. She wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these over the years.

She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50 after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google probably made a nice percentage of this sale.

Think of how many times that situation is repeated every day, all over the world.

There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a printing press...

I've been assuming I'm somewhere close to normal (definitely debatable) and that most people when they want to buy something just go and do it. How many people actually see an ad, get excited about it, click through, buy the product, and then come out of a kind of trance or something and wonder what caused them to do that? I'm probably more susceptible to candy displays at grocery check out counters than I am to online advertising. I'll occasionally buy one of those and tell the clerk it's an "impulse buy".

I assume there's a reason this is a billion dollar industry, but if I'm the poor schlub they are targeting then I wonder how they even stay afloat.

You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad incentives, but it also provides support for cooky projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete lies.

Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money, though.

My towel is also damp if you can’t tell

I seem to remember an article a long time ago that pulled back the curtain on a lot of these niche dating sites. Apparently it's all basically just a single backend with a whole bunch of different front ends and they just use attributes to decide which niches you could potentially fall it. It has the effect of having lots of niches for people to sign up for, but a bigger user base in each one since they're basically pulling names out of a common dating pool.

The example in the article was that there was one site specifically for dating farmers and one sight specifically for dating within some specific religious denomination. But if you identified your religion in the farmer ones people in the religious one would see your profile too and vice versa. And, of course, the whole thing was just lousy with bots and scammers.

I read this article ages ago though. At least 6 or 7 years. I'd be surprised if that dynamic was still working.

I've wondered this for years, but I think I know why they don't do this.

If they asked me what ads I'd be interested in seeing, and were to abide by my exact parameters, that would limit how many ads they can show me and hence how much money they can make.

Instead, they spend billions to make guesses on what to show me, not just to show me what I want to see, but to make guesses on what I don't know that I want to see, opening up the door to showing me many more ads and make more money. That and they know that even ads for things I'm not interested in at the moment can persuade me to buy in the future.

Of course, I'm not saying that any of their methods are actually very effective. Whenever I've turned uBlock Origin off, or saw ads on Hulu, I don't remember ever seeing something that's even remotely interesting to me or got me to engage. Like a lot of things such as "AI", I believe that modern advertising is a lot of overvalued bunk that mostly has value on the perception that it's necessary. It survives because people in charge don't actually understand the technicalities behind advertising, except that its use seems necessary and correlates with continued cash flow.

A trick I think they're missing though is that I'm a lot more likely to pay for things a better version of myself should want, even more so if I've essentially asked my advertisers to nag me about it. The potential conversion rates are so much higher that I think any network which gets this right is set to blow the competition out of the water.

The basic advertising infrastructure has been A/B tested to death. And one of the biggest takeaways that is that what people think that they respond to is not what they actually will respond to. One of the next biggest is that people who actually have responded are often completely unaware of what it is that they are responding to.

The underlying reason is simple. A/B testing is very good at teasing out what we respond to before we consciously notice that we are responding. But since that happens before we are conscious of it, we lack awareness of what caused that.

But the simple fact remains. If you think that advertising would work better if they just did things the way that you think that they should, you are almost certainly wrong.

Really though, it's a wasted opportunity. I have childhood ambitions that I'd follow up almost any realistic lead to achieve. I refuse to believe that out of six billion people, not one has created a product that would help me. But nobody in the ad space is even asking for my input.

In similar vein, why not just advertise based on the content the person is currently consuming? Put fishing ads into an article about fishing, the same way people put gun ads into gun magazines.

Given how abysmal targetted advertising is I don't see this being much worse.

Why not advertise based on what they consumed last week too? And once you start down that path it's like the Netflix recommendation problem. Also, at scale one Hope's they refine the algorithms based on actual CTR feedback.

from my personal experience because it takes a way too static view of my consumption habits. Echoing some other replies here I find these personal recommender systems to be completely awful.

They constantly recommend me stuff I've already bought or have no interest in any more, and Netflix constantly overfits what I like, vastly underestimating genres I haven't seen yet while recommending me awful shows presumably just because they fall into some sort of similar buckets to higher quality shows I've watched.

Case in point, the NYT already got rid of behavioural targetting in Europe last year and actually saw ad-revenue go up. (https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/)

Maybe you're thinking of how it is now, but when Netflix had its sophisticated Cinematch, its recommendations were much, much better.

This is known as the Amazon vacuum problem. Try buying a vacuum and your suggestions will be about vacuums forever!

* You have concrete intent

* At a 5% return rate (pretty low), that's 5% you're going to buy the alternative

I'm not sure I buy it.

As for why:

1. I don't have much data except myself but I can't remember buying from those ads.

I can remember smiling at them a lot though.

2. That wouldn't explain why I get ads for the exact same product I bought.

Here's another argument I remember from marketing at engineering school:

Some marketing is justified even after the customer has bought -especially with expensive items - to make them feel like they did the right thing (which in turn should make them less likely to return it.)

If not, presumably the "large team specifically to support this year of a dozen people" that NYT assembled has built a system to infer those things about you.

This is NYT trying to stay competitive in light of CCPA (which state will adopt it next? my guesses are NY, OR, MA, or WA) and GDPR. First-party audience segmentation is now all but required for larger publishers.

From the article:

> Those segments are broken up into 6 categories: age (age ranges, generation), income (HHI, investable assets, etc.), business (level, industry, retirement, etc.), demo (gender, education, marital status, etc.) and interest (fashion, etc.)

The point is, I'm not really convinced that tracking is necessary in order to produce more relevant ads. I guess it's kinda necessary in order to track how many views an ad gets, but there's gotta be a better way to do that, and it doesn't need to collect any data other than "viewed++" or maybe a bit more to prevent gaming the system.

I ran some quick numbers myself to see how the early experiments with it were doing, in regards to click through rates, and I didn't see any statistically significant improvements. I became very very skeptical -- one of the many things that led to me having a large fallout with the founder.

Now I'm sure in the intervening decade there's been improvements, and this is just one anecdotal datapoint, so I can't make strong claims about the efficacy of retargeting generally -- but I remain skeptical.

I went to a e-bike manufacturer's website a couple months ago and they chased me around the internet with ads for like a week.

Question is if one is willing to do that, or not. I prefer blocking them.

"yes Amazon I have just brought that TTRPG supplement why would I want to buy it again"

Yeah I'm full up on computers/cars/kayaks/trailers/riding lawnmowers right now, thanks.

Maybe sell me monitors or printers instead, or wait a month and show me fancy kayak paddles, GoPro, or roof rack mounts that save my back.

I could be wrong here, but I think it's because marketing folks believe that they know you better than you know yourself. That certainly seems the case with salespeople, whose role is to pitch something that may not be desired right away.

Advertisers may be bidding too highly on "targeted" demographics, but that's outside the issues of organizations like New York Times. Its in NYT's best interest to get the highest bids possible.

They may have been monitoring the difference in ad prices between highly targeted and not, and decided the difference no longer worth it.

When you get clean data like Facebook and Google with their first-party access, they can know you better than your own friends.

I think you misunderstand who the customer is here. What you want is irrelevant. It's what they can get you to pay for.

If you knew what you wanted, you could just type that into a search box. Clearly, the NYT display ads have other purposes. Looking at the home page now, the ones I see are to spark feelings of need and suggest a solution at the same time. Skipping right over the part where I think about needing something and figure out the best way to solve that need.

I am not actually a subscriber though, but I think I might become one for at least a while after this is in place just to try to reward companies moving in this direction. It would be refreshing to be able to go to a news site and not have noscript show dozens of domains in it's list.

The most profitable ad categories are in things like insurance and legal. Who would opt in to those?

The OP's approach doesn't depend on people opting into legal ads. You can use ML/regressions/whatever to extrapolate the best people to show which type of legal ads based on their interests, even if those interests do not include "Legal". There doesn't even need to be an opt-out option at all. I don't think consumers would mind, since opt-outs reduce the service's advertising revenue which in turn increases the cost of the service. Almost no one wants to pay more money.

Your natural learning just failed. Congratulations. Can't wait to see the Machine learned version you want to force on people completely unawares of what you're doing.

Privacy bloody means something. Until you start respecting people's desire to be left well enough alone, and not have their attention imposed on by obnoxious advertising, all you are going to door ensure that the wave of sentiment against the practice grows more and more severe.

Wherever advertising is necessary to keep a website running and up to date, being anti-advertising is akin to being anti-working to get your money or anti-walking to get to your destination.

But do you not feed that with all sorts of data you aggregate about the user?

The above approach might not be perfect, but I would compare it to the recent trend towards organic food. Organic food is simply costlier and less efficient to produce. Nonetheless, a growing number of people wouldn't do without it. They only visit stores with organic meat and produce. Websites that completely eschew tracking and third party tracker data can be the "Whole Foods" of websites.

Basic ML clustering - its not perfect.

https://alejandrorioja.com/high-cpc-adsense-keywords/

You also see it in Google keyword prices:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/most-expensive-keywords-g...

The most profitable keywords are in industries where there is a high lifetime customer cost. Most of those are mundane because the less you think about it, the longer you stay as a customer.

Sure...

I know some of the people who are the target. People who would buy 3 lifetime supplies of coffee because of a 20% sale. People who can't pass something framed as an exceptional offer. And of course, they are in debts.

Fuck advertisement. It is preying on vulnerable people, it is making markets less efficient (by distorting information and urging consumers to not act rationally). Forbid this scam. Fund internet service in a saner way.

Personally, my interest fluctuates quite a lot and is probably closer to the current article than a median projection. When I want to buy a new thing, that interest is only valid for the time until the purchase decision.

It's just an observation and probably naive. But it seems like content-based ads could be quite efficient while requiring much less privacy-invading tracking.

Sometimes contextual relevancy is the best. Ads on search results are contextual since they can be easily aligned to what you're looking for.

Other times, the content is generic or there's more info about the user (which is usually more behavioral than simple interests) and it's better to target that way. For example, you may be reading local news but you looked at new shoes yesterday, so it's better to show you ads for the shoes and try to complete that purchase than generic ads for local businesses.

Like, I'm reading cooking recipes and might actually be really interested in this fancy cooking equipment or specialized book on the topic.

Just don't tell me about that when I'm thinking coding and clutter up my thoughts.

Three weeks later I've hired a lawyer and bought a rolling pin and I don't need those ads anymore, they are perhaps the least profitable ads to show me.

There isn't a cheap way to do it without using some data. People don't often research stores in an area, once they find one in an area, so you're basically left to hope that people drive by and see the store name to Google it -- but those are people who were going to your site already.

Again, I don't want my thought processes hijacked, so the only acceptable context would be me searching for general stores or things that you carry, which I usually.. don't. If I'm looking at a map it is a good fit as well.

On the other hand, I'd really like a searchable inventory of all city stores, even in general terms. Sometimes it's not even clear which store might carry some obscure item and I'm left to guess and check all possibilities in person, often in vain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting

Unfortunately for every person in marketing who like Seth Godin cares even a little about things like privacy and consent, the marketing industry is full of thousands of people who would rather ram all kinds of ads as quickly and frequently as possible in front of every unwilling eyeball possible to try to brainwash as many impressionable people as possible into believing they need all kinds of things that they had no interest in previously. It’s a numbers game. They don’t just want to sell people things they want or need or would benefit from. They don’t even want to simply introduce people to unexpected solutions for problems they actually have. They want to do those things but they also want to exploit every psychological weakness possible to introduce new wants and new needs and new problems and insecurities into the consciousness of their targets because one can’t maximize sales without psychologically manipulating more people into thinking they want or need things they don’t.

Ads are primarily exploiting impressionable insecure people with poor impulse control.

That said, removing 3rd party data is a big deal, because 3rd party data is consistently one of the worst offenders but also one of the simpler ways to make your advertising slots more valuable.

At face value, it means:

1. They are not buying/using data gathered about you from elsewhere by other companies and other websites.

2. They are still directly analyzing data they gather about you from sites owned by NYT.

3. They could still use data gathered from sites affiliated with NYT using NYT trackers, if that's something NYT does. No idea if NYT does it.

NYT seems to do this with sites they own like The Wirecutter. Even privacy preferences are controlled by shared infrastructure. For example, thewirecutter.com uses https://purr.nytimes.com/v1/directives, which serves this JSON. Presumably the values depend on which regulations you're covered by:

  {
    "PURR_AcceptableTrackers":
      {"value":"controllers"},
    "PURR_AcceptableTrackers_v2":
      {"value":"processors"},
    "PURR_AdConfiguration":
      {"value":"full"},
    "PURR_AdConfiguration_v2":
      {"value":"rdp"},
    "PURR_CaliforniaNoticesUI":
      {"value":"hide"},
    "PURR_DataProcessingConsentUI":
      {"value":"hide"},
    "PURR_DataProcessingPreferenceUI":
      {"value":"hide"},
    "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI":
      {"value":"hide"},
    "PURR_DataSaleOptOutUI_v2":
      {"value":"hide"},
    "PURR_EmailMarketingOptInUI":
      {"value":"checked"}
  }

From the perspective of GDPR at least, I’m pretty sure NYT and its owned sites count as one controller/processor, and I think passes the sniff test for case #2 rather than case #3.

No, they are trying to guess which add will produce the best return in terms of advertiser-sought behavioral changes if shown to you. That probably has some overlap with ads you are interested in, but it's not the same thing.

> Did they ever think to just ask me?

The ads that it is generally most valuable to show are the ones that the target wouldn't expect to have interest in. Advertising largely exists to create desire; if you ask people what advertising they'd like to see they will identify the advertising that would do the least to change their behavior from what it would be without the ads, which defeats the point. Untargeted ads would probably be more effective.

Even if that weren't true interests change and you'd never update a profile like that, and the most profitable things to advertise for you'd never put on it in the first place even if you remembered.

Even if that weren't true, the people that would would make the most money would be the people who got to you before you got around to updating it.

As context: I'm 32 years old now. I've been advertising online since I was 15.

Being able to hoover up information that is more up to date than when you last filled out the survey means they could potentially be more accurate. i.e. You're shopping for some type of product, your search history and browser history indicates this, but is outside the realm of what you filled out in the survey. Being able to direct some ads that fit your current needs could be lucrative.

I'm not an advertiser, but this is just my small bit of thought on it. Perhaps others are able to confirm or deny this is what's happening.

Another note, Facebook and Google are both some of the largest companies in the world because of their advertising technology. We created them with our clicks.

This would assume that the goal is to show you what you want to see, rather than to show you what advertisers want you to see based on what they think you need to see and might respond positively to.