undefined | Better HN

0 pointsseanp2k23y ago0 comments

The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind, like never before in history have we had this much info about consumers, and yet Hulu chooses to run pharma ads for us all day for conditions that no one we know of have. That, combined with all the ridiculous mobile ads plus complicated cookie BS on the mobile web make it almost unreadable even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device. I don't mind paying for content, but publishers still find ways to punish anyone trying to get any kind of a deal, e.g. Apple News+ subscriptions don't work to log in to actual sites, so you can ONLY read most of those via the Apple News app which of course doesn't allow commenting, and doesn't integrate with my feed reader or browser in a way that lets me actually view articles I come across on those publications via other means, so I must find the name + publication of an article, switch to Apple News, try to browse to find that, and usually by that point I just stop caring and go do something else. Another workaround for places like Rolling Stone is to just switch to private browsing and use the however many "free" article views per month...again as someone who technically does pay for access to this content via Apple News+. I feel like I'm slowly arriving at the conclusion that any in-app browsers should be considered harmful on mobile due to the integration and UX headaches they pose. What's so bad about opening the system browser instead of your app's awful skin on top of mobile Safari, with a window that takes up most of the screen but doesn't have all the features of the normal system browser and might close at any point for $reasons....

Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?

0 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

mertd3y ago

> The amount of just totally irrelevant ads we get these days blows my mind,

> even with aggressive pihole on our network plus adblockers on every device.

Please don't take this as snark but these two statements are not uncorrelated. You're basically saying, "don't send targeted ads" and you're getting what you asked for.

SuoDuanDao3y ago

I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more.

I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse