I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.
Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there's like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?
Yes, most people. Adblockers are used by a minority.
An unfortunate truth.
Some people justify it by stating that they keep ads because they want to support the websites, but don't know that at the very least they should be blocking trackers and 3rd party cookies
they want to support the websites
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
Someone on here some weeks ago had a beef with me saying I skip passed promo content in YouTube videos. They said something about wanting to support the videomakers. K, but if I’m not in the market for a new mattress (as an example of an ad I sometimes hear), it doesn’t make sense for me to listen to the sponsored mattress read-through. If I don’t make a purchase with the YouTuber’s promo code, then what’s the difference if I skip a couple minutes ahead? Do I owe a video “respect” by listening anyway? And if for some reason the advertiser cares more about me listening to their spiel than about me actually making a purchase, well, that’s silly and sucks for them.
There are some things advertised that I’m never going to buy no matter how much they’re shown to me. Meal kits, gambling sites, men’s boxers, these are all things I’ve seen countless sponsored ad placements mid-video for, and they are all things I don’t use and can’t see myself using. Yet the ads persist.
So I will continue skipping.
Are these people actually clicking on the ads and making purchases through them? Because if all they’re doing is letting the ads clutter space, but not interacting with them, does that really support the site at all?
For the most part, no, it doesn't support the site, since most Google ads are PPC (Pay-Per-Click).
It's not actually most. It's just enough to cover the ad spend.
Someone needs to create malware that installs ad blockers. That will more than half their conversion rate.
They absolutely are. Everything I got from my family this past Christmas was slop from the TikTok shop. They just clicked the first ad they saw and bought whatever. I even got two of the same item because my brother didn't realize he clicked two ads for the same thing. I've been calling it Dropshipmas.
Oh shit I forgot all about this! After the holidays, everyone in the office was talking about all the garbage they got, and most of them were talking about how many sales/deals they got off of Tiktok.
There are enough stories about somebody installing a pi-hole and a family member getting angry because now the ads for all the pretty things are gone.
Ads Georg, who lives in a cave and looks at adverts 17.7 billion times a day is an outlier and should not be counted.
I think it's different if you consider ads as a way to maintain the status quo.
Like, there's an ad I keep seeing on TV where 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago plays as parents struggle to keep up with the parenting responsibilities of their toddlers. It's an ad for Amazon. And thank god for Amazon for being available to help these parents.
And like...everybody knows about Amazon. Nobody is going to suddenly sign up for a Prime account after seeing this ad. However, parents or expecting parents who already have Prime accounts are going to relate to the people in the ad and not even consider other options for their parenting needs.
Maybe a very specific example, and their are certainly ads just telling you to buy chicken nuggets, but I'm seeing it more and more.
Edit: Or hell, look at detergents. Do you really think Tide has innovated anything in the past 30 years?
Yeah like McD reminding you about their big Mac and fries. They know you know about it but they want to think about food because you might be slightly hungry and could eat. They are not ads but subliminal messages.
And you'll remember the ad when you drive by a Makkers a few days later
It's about being in your mind-space, even days later in the shop. Which works 50/50 on some people and not at all on the others. But that's good enough to bother all of humanity i guess.
Which means ads follow the same rules as so-called “pick up artists.” No wonder they annoy me so much.
Not once, even when I was a little kid, have I been convinced to want a product more because of an ad like that. People know about McDonald's, they know about Coca-Cola, they know about Hilton, they know about Disney+, the only real reason they have to advertise is to tell us about their new products that some of them have once in a while, or a deal of some kind. I can understand Dreamworks advertising a new movie for about a week, after that, the public probably knows. Same thing for Chick-Fil-A's new sandwiches and whatnot. But they never stop. They go for a month and a half, two even. Other brands, like Marriott, nothing's changed. We know that we can buy a hotel room and get free breakfast, we know, we'll pay for it if/when we need it, but we're not getting a room just for the "experience". These ads must be working, they've been dumping money into them for over a century at this point, maybe I'm just too autistic to understand how.
It's not about convincing people to buy the product. It's about keeping the brand in the public consciousness. For example, they want Coca-Cola to be synonymous with carbonated soft drinks, so that when you want to buy a soda, the first option you think of is Coke, and not Pepsi or some other brand.
If I were a crackpot theorist, which I am not but I dabble, I would say I wouldn't be surprised if ads serve as a medium of population control.
The "algorithms" are also dumb as fuck. For example on a large retailer site you spend a couple of hours browsing for a particular kind of item. You are comparing different kinds, looking up reviews and issues, watching YouTube videos about them. And finally you pull the trigger and but the thing. Then for the next 3 months that site (and others that picked up on the research) will go: Hey here are some more of that thing you like, you really liked it right? Would you like to compare some more items? Uhm no, I actually bought said thing, you made the sale. All of that "targeted" advertisement is just wasted, I have zero interest anymore since the need has been filled.
It's either that or stuff I can't afford (like memory or graphic cards) or really weird stuff I have no idea why it's being shown to me. Sometimes very alarmingly so. Just recently I got an ad that said "Popular in your region" and it was for illegal Nazi dogwhistle flags, "self defense knifes", baseball bats and tracksuits. That's a bit scary. On the other hand the same site gave me an ad for an "easy to conceal" blowjob machine sex toy. Like holy shit what kind of people are living in my region?
Targeted ads have been terrible for as long as I can remember. I don't think I ever bought anything through an ad or hardly ever even clicked on them. Only time I click on them is because the site and my adblocker are fighting and when I try to click somewhere on the page, it inserts an ad the last millisecond, shifts the entire page so I accidentally click on it.
Amazon thought I was a toilet seat collector for 3-6 months after I bought a 3-pack. No amount of not clicking on those promoted items could convince them otherwise.
It thought I was a transvestite for lime a year after a Christmas where I bought my my mom a sweater, and my girlfriend jewelery.
Like full on recommending me panties and lingerie in my mens size 32 waist.
When that one embarrassing purchase from last year still haunts your algo...
I had to buy adult diapers for my elderly parents. Whoo boy did that unleash a storm.
One of the parts that gets me is there is a good opportunity for more sales there (if that should happen is another debate I don't have the energy for). A few years ago I bought an electric kettle. So cue months of ads for electric kettles. It's a kettle, you only need one. Now if I had been shown different teas or coffees, stuff I would use the kettle to make, they would have absolutely hooked me easily. I had a new toy, I was excited to use it, I would have loved trying new teas with it. I still did, but they were all ones I chose.
True. If I buy a fridge try selling me other kitchen appliances because I might be remodeling. Don't try to sell me more fridges. This is ludicrous!
I bought a used school bus on eBay a few years ago (to turn into a skoolie) and since then I've been bombarded with ads for used school buses. I can assure anyone interested that one is more than enough. Yes, there are school districts and companies that maintain large fleets of school buses, but they do not buy them on fucking eBay.
I still get recommended tampons because my ex-gf bought some with my Amazon account 5+ years ago. Peak recommendation brilliance.
I think it was proctor gamble that zeroed out their $200 million yearly adtech spend and saw zero impact to their sales from it. There's a good possibility we're making everything terrible just so that Zuckerberg and friends can keep getting richer to nobody else's actual benefit.
Yeah, I dare say there's companies that benefit from it, but P&G is one of those companies that exist purely on creatures of habit buying the same big branded boxes every month, because they haven't fallen quite far enough in life to consider supermarket-brand products.
In much the same way as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no clueless husband ever got told off for bringing home P&G branded fanny pads.
ICE is using Palantir data to target neighborhoods, which is purchased directly from "advertising" data brokers. So "advertising" is only part of the story. It's always been about delivering a surveillance state, it's just not evenly distributed.
It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance
The ads companies hate the government too. They don't want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There's no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
I think "surveillance" doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. "Surveillance" sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
I lived in a country where people don't speak English. There's a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn't understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn't figure even that absolutely critical detail out.
This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.
If the ad companies can't even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.
when i used apps with targeted ads, amongst generic type of stuff i also used to get two polar opposites of ads:
ah, we see you're in poland and use english a lot, want to learn english?
ah, we see you're in poland and use english a lot, we can help you get your immigration papers for legal employment
both at the same time btw. apparently being a polish national who speaks english fluently marked me as some sort of ad-anomaly
the ads also believed that i was a senior? at some point i even got a spam call inviting me to join a study on back pain T–T like bro you're at least 10 years early, relax
i think advertising purposes are just a front. They use it for something, but ads is just an afterthought/excuse for public.
I find it so funny how I use Spotify daily*, and the account is linked** to my google account that I use a lot, and in the past I made sure to downvote any ads that don’t fit my interests at all, so basically giving as much aminition to give some good targeted ads to me.
Turns out, after all that, I get rubbish collection ads, face mask ads and wastewater management ads, even though I have truly never thought about any of those nor have shown interest in them, AND I’ve shown tons of interest in only technology.
Asterisks
(*) - I use the iOS mobile app, so I can’t really block ads unfortunately, even though I’d love to :/
(**) - I made the google and Spotify accounts when I was in my early teens, so I didn’t really know or care about digital footprint or tracking, so if I was able to go back, I would’ve at the very least gotten multiple google accounts to sandbox my activities. But hey, better late than never I guess!
I have friends who don't use adblockers (!) but I have never heard anyone say that they bought something they saw in an ad.
A targeted ad consists of showing you what you just bought from the same exact website you just got it from.
Like, it's just a scam towards the businesses at this point and a waste of my time and bandwidth.
Amazon: I see you just bought one coat rack; would you like to start your coat rack collection with these other coat racks?
I mean I think that it does work on most people. I have a few people in my life who just don't block ads. Some of them do not even change their radio frequency when ads play through it. They think that they can choose for it to not affect them, but that's not really how propaganda works.
Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who'd never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, "Fuck it, let's just _____"
There was a small window around 2010 when Google's targeted Ads is actually kinda good (which is to say, not annoying and somewhat relevant).
Then everything enshittified.
I think hotwords worked the best on me because I thought it was a link to something in the article. But then the law changed and they had to put "ad" on the links and it killed them. Laws work, some what.
Why do so many advertisers think I own a dog? We have like a private, digital panopticon and they still serve me ads for dogfood for dogs I don't don't have.
It's not about the ads to buy things. That's part of it for sure, but it's more than that.
Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc. want your data, your habits, routines, opinions, etc, so they can influence the way you think and behave and understand the world.
There's a clip I saw recently of Peter Thiel saying they could never get people to vote for the things they want to do, so instead they are using technology to change things.
Even if you block ads, if you still use platforms owned by tech mega-corps, they have your data. Sure you might not see the targeted ads, and so you think you're coming out ahead, but you don't realize that every piece of content you see between the ads you've blocked is being filtered to influence the way you think about the world.
The data has more direct consequences when it comes to machine learning algorithms to keep you on the website and funnel you into a personalized echo chamber.
The epitome of this is TikTok, it's algorithm was the only thing that set it apart from other short video apps. Youtube is a video host with an integrated recommendation algorithm, Tiktok is a recommendation algorithm with integrated video hosting.
It's crazy how the algorithm isn't even good, it's just effective at generating watch time on average. It tries to push you towards addictive trash constantly, whether you watch it or not. I learned rust and got "why rust sucks" and "why rust is the best language" about 25 times now despite never watching videos like that, because maybe THIS time I'll get ragebaited.
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