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0 pointsksec4y ago0 comments

>Well no one's arguing that targeted ads are not effective.

Oh they sure were. All ads are useless. Targeted ads are evil. And Ads should not be targeted were the HN's view, which later became there shouldn't even be any ads, it should all be subscription. That is 2018/19. By 20/21 HN were even targeting those who were working inside the online Ad industry. And this is seen across the tens of thousands of comments. ( Say 50 Thread of 200 comments )

It became such a problem that people working inside Ad industry were even afraid to post their views on HN. And they have to be upvoted to make sure there are still sanity inside the HN community.

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ratww4y ago

Arguing that "ads are evil" is different from calling them ineffective. Most people dislike targeted ads them because of privacy/resource usage issues. Other people dislike ads in general. Some of those want ads to stop existing exactly because of how effective they are.

llbeansandrice4y ago

> All ads are useless

I don't think I've ever seen someone say this. People hate that they make the internet impossible to use. I have a family friend that runs a small business and all of the revenue comes from ads on the websites they run. I hate using their website because of the ads.

Pop-up that takes up the whole screen asking to subscribe, auto-play video ad, content moving as ads get loaded slowly. It's all just awful to use. The ads are absolutely effective though.

galangalalgol4y ago

Ublock origin and pihole make the internet a more pleasant experience for me. It has been suggested that I should feel some nagging voice causing guilt that I do not support the sites and apps I use that depend on ad revenue. Perhaps there should be, but there is not. Apple's position on this is just responding to demand. When wifi access points start offering built in enabled pihole by default those access points will sell well. Throw in a vpn to pipe your phone through it from wherever that is easy to use/automatic and "ads are useless" may become truth.

Edit: it would likely just cause a shift to self hosted ads, which is a dramatic improvement imo.

Firmwarrior4y ago

Self-hosted ads COULD be a dramatic improvement, if the companies start vetting these ads in some way

My guess is it'll result in backend web modules that make it easy to automatically dynamically re-host the same virus- and tracker-infested malware ads we all hate

colinmhayes4y ago

Freakonomics had an episode with some econ professors who claimed their research with eBay showed targeted ads are not worth the cost. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...

dwaite4y ago

99.99% of ads are useless, by volume.

This is a side-effect of media selling advertising through brokers rather than direct, that these brokers then built tools to track impressions, clicks and sales attributions, and then created a disparity between each level of several orders of magnitude.

When advertisers were paying an order of magnitude more for ad impressions, we needed far fewer ads and those ads tended both to be of higher quality and more topically relevant.

At the current CPM, I routinely get ads which aren't spelling or grammar-checked.

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