Uhhhhh how about don't read emails? If I have a fantasy football team, please sell me football stuff. If I click on an article relating to health concerns, sell me organic whole foods stuff.
Can you imagine someone 20 years ago throwing all your mail into a scanner and saying, "don't worry I'm only checking for keywords and receipts"?
It seems to me that programmatic ads are popular mainly because it's easier to measure engagement, not because it's more profitable for publishers, then at some point Google and Facebook got the advantage of network effects.
Or even more weird, for products you already bought and are unlikely to buy again.
If the other methods could target you technically, they would
Yes, it helps. Contextual ads help me find new customers to market to, hopefully through relevant content that overlaps with my product, but what do I do with all those visitors that stop by and don't convert? Retargeting lets me capture that interest and incrementally improve my media spend - and on tens of millions a year in media spend, this can be significant.
I wish I had better alternative but unfortunately these are the tools we have to work with, and creepy ads that follow you around the internet are going to last until we figure out better ways of spending investor money without feeling like we're burning cash to the Advertising Gods.
- Game recommendations on Steam and other platforms.
- Highlighted apps on the App Store.
- Before the internet, games and apps in magazines.
Everything else that I have ever spent money on, I have discovered through word of mouth (including places like Reddit or HN), searched for it myself, seen it incidentally in the wild (e.g. hearing a song outside or seeing someone using something) or when browsing shops and stores in person.
How often do other people here remember buying something they saw in an ad (that they didn't already know of)?
I rarely ever watch cable but I swear cable ads would repeat the same exact video ad multiple times per show but maybe it has changed nowadays.
> Why is it that way? Is it really more profitable,
Probably depends on the product. For google search where your search query is generally highly relevant to what you are looking for and therefore advertisers, probably not much. For facebook when I am scrolling through the news feed and I'm not looking for any product in particular, probably a lot because that is the difference between showing me a generic ad with low click through rates versus one that is tailored towards things I probably want and therefore much more likely that I will click on it.
It is. Online, you can use statistics and probability theory to actually test what's more profitable instead of relying on ad-hoc metrics about what "feels good".
> They chase you around the web, even for products you already decided you didn’t want
These are a small minority of online ads. They're displayed in places where nothing more profitable or contextual can be displayed. (I.e., most websites, since most websites are junk.)
If I'm looking at x, selling me something that makes x easier or otherwise compliments x makes a lot more sense than selling me something that I looked at 2 months ago and didn't intend to buy.
Yes, and actually Acxiom is a lot more powerful and comprehensive than your postulation, if you care to look into them.
Unregulated data mining is, in my opinion, going to lead to the next collapse of culture. The cow is already out of the barn and it's on the way to Chicago. I don't think it's an unfair analogy considering the experiments thus far in totalitarian environments.
Kind of refutes the claim that it's just like showing specific emails with date/times to the general public.
https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-s...
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
I personally don't know anyone daft enough to use their services up here in Canada - even in the US (where I have personally seen the 'average Joe's' tech knowledge - especially in central and southern states - shockingly much less than that in Canada) it seemed folks avoided it, except the lowest-of-the-low in terms of tech knowledge.
They have, for the years since AOL was known universally as the worst tech company, seemingly fought for that title.
EDIT: Surprised at the downvotes. I'd love to know why.
When it started to fail, it was lamented, but technically? It was exploitive and full of dumb subscribers, but the tech was fine.
> except the lowest-of-the-low in terms of tech knowledge.
Used yahoo for decades, since I was around when it started. Still do, for one email address.
Yep, AOLserver was one of the first “app servers” and it was well regarded. The other PG built his company around it.
I started to (try to) delete the account several times and always hesitated out of fear. And when I ask myself "what's the harm in leaving it there?" I can't really come up with a good answer.
Also interesting aside, Yahoo/Oath nag me every couple weeks to agree to the new Verizon draconian privacy forfeiture terms. I wonder if they'll eventually block logins and cutoff email forwarding if I never click through. My cynical hunch is that they'll equate logins with consent after updating the TOS to explain this.
Usecase: friend dies, years later some turkey kid stole his facebook bv his login was yahoo email based and BOOM has access to a lot of social media data.
Headline should read:
"Verizon after acquiring Yahoo disregards normal tech-company conventions and snoops on everyone's emails like a scummy ISP."
E.g. Superfly Insights [1], Return Path [2]
[1] https://alternativedata.org/data_provider/superfly-insights/
There's nothing inevitable about this. Even apart from law employees can steer the direction of companies, especially in tech where businesses are so dependent on a relatively small number of them. If you think privacy practises at your place of work are bad, bring it up.
Or is it perhaps more likely that Google gets enough info from users via others means that it simply wasn't getting enough value out of email scanning? Or maybe starting a trend against email scanning hurts competitors more than it hurts themselves?
[1] https://www.oath.com/press/yahoo-provides-notice-to-addition...
