HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it).
Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.
Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.
Regarding showing ads for something you just bought, I’ve always assumed the principle here is that because conversion is extremely unlikely for a given ad, the super unlikely case you’ll buy something twice is actually more likely than a random other thing.
Speaking as a consumer, I’ve always found ad targeting to be way off for Google, YouTube or even facebook. The few times I got ads I ChatGPT it was also off. It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better. It makes you wonder what all those engineers are working on if not the main revenue driver.
My experience with performance adtech was that 95% of the energy went into targeting whales, with a focus on products that drive massive revenue (mobile gaming, gambling, crypto). It's truly insane what these whales are spending.
Sure, there's still a lot of money in the 5%, especially for a surface like ChatGPT where people are making retail decisions. But I'm not particularly shocked if they're a little behind.
I understand why it's hard, but it's very funny to get ads for a product I've bought for weeks/months after completing the purchase.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.
Advertisers getting hosed is pretty much standard with digital ads. Platforms and agencies tell you how amazing their adtech is, but various forms of fraud and dodgy practises seem to be rampant.
Local advertisements can be nice. The advertisement section in the local newspaper was a thing people used to actually seek out, once upon a time. The real problem is the scaling of advertisement frameworks globally and algorithmically serving individuals or certain groups. It is strictly parasitic at that level.
If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar. A lot of newspaper ads were for luxury tchotchkes, cigarettes, booze or gambling. Back then, advertisements had some pretty substantial downsides, normalizing entire swathes of behavior that is today considered unhealthy and exploitative.
At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.
> If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar.
No. I literally never want to see an advertisement on my computer, unless I'm visiting a local forum with local advertisements. If I want to see a product or service online, I will search for it using my search engine that does not accept payment for search rankings.
Global, digital advertising is clearly a different class of advertising than local advertisements.
I'd really like for some country to ban all ads, even if just for a while, so people could observe the quasi-experiment.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
Except for socialising the entire internet age, giving poor people in 3rd world slums the same access to the same platforms as the richest 0.001%.
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
Before Google, before Reddit, before Facebook, people all over the world, rich and poor, run their own sites and their own forums, allowing them to chat with people throughout the world.
Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.
This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.
The cultural internet blip of the 90's/early 00's is never coming back. Its not a framework for a free open internet, it's an anomaly that was born from a convergence of factors that was short lived before the masses showed up. A wonderful thing to be a part of, no question I get warm fuzzies thinking about it now, but I recognize what it was. It's akin to dreaming of that time you caught Coldplay play a small london pub in 1998, and then thinking it would be so great if Coldplay could just play small pubs again. Not happening.
No disagreement there, but I do disagree that on the internet, poor and rich would not intermingle without the big tech players: they already have, and even if not for them, they would have continued.
I am not reminiscing anything here, but I do believe this counterpoint does disprove the claim to the contrary :)
> No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account.
It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.
Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled.
The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
This will end in another 'adpocalypse' episode. Something like: ChatGPT generates recipes from the Anarchist Cookbook and adds Home Depot ads at the end, or inserts Amazon affiliate links for the Turner Diaries.
Yes, ChatGPT ads are a heaping pile of garbage. I feel sorry for anyone that’s wasted perfectly good marketing spend on such nonsense.
Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money.
If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that.
But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.
presumably if this was true advertising spend would dry up in these useless cases. The fact that it hasnt and people intensely dislike spending money without getting anything for it, I suspect it must work on someone.
I suspect your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Maybe randomly advertising golf balls to random people is just as effective, but we don't have the tracking infrastructure in place for non-targeted ads in order to test that theory.
We can't use ChatGPT Ads because ChatGPT banned our company for ads for political content even though we are a CRM/Compliance tool for campaigns and the only ad we had was the autogenerated ChatGPT one they made. No chance at an appeal either. We had this issue with Bing Ads but microsoft fixed it and even personally called to apologize about the mixup.
I have no idea why anyone would click on any ad anywhere other than by accident, not knowing if the link might take them to some malware site these days.
I would never click on the weird ads that the supposedly "brightest minds of our generation" have delivered to me via some nonsensical middleman auction system.
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
I agree, before the age of enshittification, when I went to actual blogs, sometimes I did see ads worth my time. But these days most blogs I would visit are hosted on sites that just use ad farms, and the targeting is awful (which, hey, I am on my apple devices most of the time and I disable all tracking) but mostly I would never feel confident that clicking the ad wouldn't bring me to some spyware infested hole. I am far more leery of where I would go when I click it than I am concerned that I'm not the target demographic.
I clicked on a couple ads once because I was desperate - I needed a cheap flight with a tight deadline and my usual search engines didn't help. I thought "if these ads deliver what they promise, I'll never book anywhere else".
Sometimes (I especially notice this on the App Store, but sometimes Google), companies bid on their own name. So you'll search something like "Discord" and the first result will be an ad for Discord, and then below is the organic results which has them first anyways.
I have bid in Google Adwords on my own product name. If you don't, then a competitor else might, and then they will appear above you in search. It isn't nice, but that is the way it is.
I have wondered why this happens for awhile now. I had no idea - I feel like if a product name matches exactly what I searched for, no ad should ever be ABOVE that match. It makes me a tad angry you guys have to pay to get this behavior.
> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate.
I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.
Well I think your experiment more shows that while Open AI is trying to position this as a viable marketing platform, in reality folks with marketing dollars do spend aren’t buying what they’re selling so you’re able to win at pricing far below where they really want/need the market to be.
The cost of clicks tends to rise over time with advertising platforms (Google 'the law of shitty clickthrus'). This effect is very noticeable with Google Adwords, for example. So it makes sense to get in early with a new platform and try and get some traffic, before the big corporates push the prices up.
facebook ad targeting is also garbage. They have my entire history since 2004 and they still sometimes: think I'm a woman, think I need things for a newborn, think I'm in the market for "short men clothing" (I'm 6'0"), and so on. Sometimes I get ads for farm equipment (I am a lifelong city dweller).
Now let's be honest: short men clothing is basically modern, "slim fit" clothing; you get that fashionable bare-ankles look with short pants.
And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?
The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them.
I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians (same state), which might be targeted, but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for. (opposite side of the country)
Ads are part of the enshitification of ChatGPT. In the short-term it might offer them some kind of lifeline and I'm sure in their next investor call they'll highlight their revenue from Ads.
But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.
Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.
I occasionally enjoy well executed ads, like something that’s creative enough to make me curious, but nowadays, I’m seeing a lot of ads on YouTube that’s obviously low-effort AI slop, they are boring, fake, and depressing.
I saw them today in the app and yeah… first idea - enshitification. Ads were cringe. But google works the same way - cringe ads. I use google in 3-4 different languages and it’s completely lost.
Do they though? It is often very hard to know with ads. My experience is that most people spending money on ads have no idea if they are getting any sort of return. Are there any studies that show billboard ads work?
BTW That why money off vouchers are so common with ads. Because this is an actual way you can check if the ad is working. Although there are confounding factors - maybe they were going to buy from you before they saw the voucher?
If you saw a product from a brand on a billboard on your commute, and a product from a brand you've never seen before, you'd probably be able to pick which one you've never seen before.
HN isn't really a good place to have an informed discussion on ads efficacy unfortunately. In this thread we have many many people talking about how online ads in general are completely worthless. All of the top comments I see are harping on things like Google Ads having bad targeting for reasons like you are getting recommendations on products you just bought (having experience in the ads industry, yes this is actually a good signal that you might buy another one, even if you don't want to believe it).
Meanwhile, the article is actually discussing ChatGPT ads specifically compared to Google Ads, which they do have success with.
Anyway, my guess is that it's a combination of 1. OpenAI being new and not having the massive work needed yet to set up a fully successful ads network, but they're recruiting a lot of talent from the area + recsys so it's probably not too far off. And 2. we don't really know in general yet how best to do in context ad recommendations. I think this will also improve pretty rapidly with how much talent is working in the space. The best ads will probably look a lot more like Google Search per-request targeted ads rather than Instagram style per-user targeted ads, but I believe we'll see lots of gains fast.
Regarding showing ads for something you just bought, I’ve always assumed the principle here is that because conversion is extremely unlikely for a given ad, the super unlikely case you’ll buy something twice is actually more likely than a random other thing.
As someone who has been doing marketing and buying ads for 20 years, I find your optimism touching. ;0)
Speaking as a consumer, I’ve always found ad targeting to be way off for Google, YouTube or even facebook. The few times I got ads I ChatGPT it was also off. It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better. It makes you wonder what all those engineers are working on if not the main revenue driver.
It may be that you just aren't a big spender.
My experience with performance adtech was that 95% of the energy went into targeting whales, with a focus on products that drive massive revenue (mobile gaming, gambling, crypto). It's truly insane what these whales are spending.
Sure, there's still a lot of money in the 5%, especially for a surface like ChatGPT where people are making retail decisions. But I'm not particularly shocked if they're a little behind.
>It’s kinda ironic that with all that AI, they choose not to use any of that intelligence to target ads better.
I couldn't possibly be more par for course for OpenAI
I understand why it's hard, but it's very funny to get ads for a product I've bought for weeks/months after completing the purchase.
I looked for rain boots, and I bought a pair of rain boots. Getting ads for rain boots now isn't going to drive any purchasing, right? Meta or Alphabet get paid still, so the advertisers are getting hosed.
You might return them and get another brand. Even that little positive signal is often worth the wasted impressions because most of the other signals are either so weak or so competitive.
Advertisers getting hosed is pretty much standard with digital ads. Platforms and agencies tell you how amazing their adtech is, but various forms of fraud and dodgy practises seem to be rampant.
Everything with ads is garbage. All the time. It poses no benefit to humanity even a little bit.
Local advertisements can be nice. The advertisement section in the local newspaper was a thing people used to actually seek out, once upon a time. The real problem is the scaling of advertisement frameworks globally and algorithmically serving individuals or certain groups. It is strictly parasitic at that level.
If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar. A lot of newspaper ads were for luxury tchotchkes, cigarettes, booze or gambling. Back then, advertisements had some pretty substantial downsides, normalizing entire swathes of behavior that is today considered unhealthy and exploitative.
At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.
> If "can be nice" is the bar of quality we hold ads to, then all advertisement passes the bar.
No. I literally never want to see an advertisement on my computer, unless I'm visiting a local forum with local advertisements. If I want to see a product or service online, I will search for it using my search engine that does not accept payment for search rankings.
Global, digital advertising is clearly a different class of advertising than local advertisements.
I'd really like for some country to ban all ads, even if just for a while, so people could observe the quasi-experiment.
My personal bet would be the country would suffer for it quite a lot, similar to places that have banned e.g. loans, but it'd be very cool if I were wrong!
Maybe we should look at paid media as a honeypot.
Without paid media, marketing spend gets pushed to “organic” and “content marketing” aka blog spam and other crap.
Yes.
But then, is any and all public communication about a product or a service originating from a stakeholder of said product or feature basically an ad?
Except for socialising the entire internet age, giving poor people in 3rd world slums the same access to the same platforms as the richest 0.001%.
No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account, and almost all content is still produced by massive media conglomerates.
Ads suck and everyone hates them, but don't lose sight of what they enabled by hyperfocusing on the bad.
Before Google, before Reddit, before Facebook, people all over the world, rich and poor, run their own sites and their own forums, allowing them to chat with people throughout the world.
Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.
This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.
The cultural internet blip of the 90's/early 00's is never coming back. Its not a framework for a free open internet, it's an anomaly that was born from a convergence of factors that was short lived before the masses showed up. A wonderful thing to be a part of, no question I get warm fuzzies thinking about it now, but I recognize what it was. It's akin to dreaming of that time you caught Coldplay play a small london pub in 1998, and then thinking it would be so great if Coldplay could just play small pubs again. Not happening.
No disagreement there, but I do disagree that on the internet, poor and rich would not intermingle without the big tech players: they already have, and even if not for them, they would have continued.
I am not reminiscing anything here, but I do believe this counterpoint does disprove the claim to the contrary :)
> No one likes to acknowledge this, but there is an alternate timeline where only the rich kid in school has a Google account, reddit account, meta account.
It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.
Ads didn't give us Wikipedia. The vast majority of blogs and forums were not for profit. Specialised media outlets were always subscription-based. Large amounts of valuable information like research papers, technical documentation and curated databases were paywalled.
The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.
An yet here we are, on a giant advertisement.
Its marketing all the way down. ;0)
The clear mark of someone who's never owned a business and had to find customers to sell their product.
This will end in another 'adpocalypse' episode. Something like: ChatGPT generates recipes from the Anarchist Cookbook and adds Home Depot ads at the end, or inserts Amazon affiliate links for the Turner Diaries.
Yes, ChatGPT ads are a heaping pile of garbage. I feel sorry for anyone that’s wasted perfectly good marketing spend on such nonsense.
Outside a captive platform like Amazon, most ads are garbage and a total waste of money.
If I’m on Amazon trying to buy X and my search for X “promotes” an option to the top of the list yeah that probably influences me buying that.
But the broader online ad ecosystem is a total waste of money. Yes, I once searched a question about golf balls… no I don’t want to see “targeted ads” about golf balls following me all over the internet for the next three weeks.
Amazon is garbage too. It keeps showing the same product that I already bought.
True :-).
Probably more that from an ROI perspective that’s probably the “least worst” vs the best.
presumably if this was true advertising spend would dry up in these useless cases. The fact that it hasnt and people intensely dislike spending money without getting anything for it, I suspect it must work on someone.
I suspect your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Maybe randomly advertising golf balls to random people is just as effective, but we don't have the tracking infrastructure in place for non-targeted ads in order to test that theory.
It's interesting the ChatGPT referrals conversions match Googles. Shows once they tune a few knobs, they could have a cashcow on their hands.
We can't use ChatGPT Ads because ChatGPT banned our company for ads for political content even though we are a CRM/Compliance tool for campaigns and the only ad we had was the autogenerated ChatGPT one they made. No chance at an appeal either. We had this issue with Bing Ads but microsoft fixed it and even personally called to apologize about the mixup.
I have no idea why anyone would click on any ad anywhere other than by accident, not knowing if the link might take them to some malware site these days.
I would never click on the weird ads that the supposedly "brightest minds of our generation" have delivered to me via some nonsensical middleman auction system.
But I go to some blogs (philosophy, jazz, and men's clothing) that have ads that are literally just image links. The ads are actually relevant to the content, and because I go to the blog of my own volition, that means that more often than not the ads are at least somewhat relevant and usually worth a look, like the curated ones you see in a magazine. Most other ads online are so irrelevant it's almost comical, and I have no idea why people pay to use those services. All these tech giants who make enormous sums of money from advertising are emperors with no clothes - a hard look at the quality of their product reveals it's unanimously considered garbage by the public. Their promise of delivering hyper targeted advertisement was obviously a lie predicated on market capture and becoming the only middlemen in town.
I agree, before the age of enshittification, when I went to actual blogs, sometimes I did see ads worth my time. But these days most blogs I would visit are hosted on sites that just use ad farms, and the targeting is awful (which, hey, I am on my apple devices most of the time and I disable all tracking) but mostly I would never feel confident that clicking the ad wouldn't bring me to some spyware infested hole. I am far more leery of where I would go when I click it than I am concerned that I'm not the target demographic.
I clicked on a couple ads once because I was desperate - I needed a cheap flight with a tight deadline and my usual search engines didn't help. I thought "if these ads deliver what they promise, I'll never book anywhere else".
Believe it or not, they did not deliver.
Sometimes (I especially notice this on the App Store, but sometimes Google), companies bid on their own name. So you'll search something like "Discord" and the first result will be an ad for Discord, and then below is the organic results which has them first anyways.
I have bid in Google Adwords on my own product name. If you don't, then a competitor else might, and then they will appear above you in search. It isn't nice, but that is the way it is.
I have wondered why this happens for awhile now. I had no idea - I feel like if a product name matches exactly what I searched for, no ad should ever be ABOVE that match. It makes me a tad angry you guys have to pay to get this behavior.
>I feel like if a product name matches exactly what I searched for, no ad should ever be ABOVE that match.
It must be lovely to be that innocent. ;0)
I have run many ad campaigns across various platforms, and I have come away with 2 main thoughts:
1. Click fraud is rampant, and the ad platforms seem to not care in the least as long as they can drain your budget.
2. The ad bidding process is completely opaque, and no auditing seems to be done, my inclination is that there is large scale fraud here too.
> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic. However 0.46% is a shockingly low conversion rate.
I'm not an ad guru by any means, but isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that? Seems like a you-get-what-you-pay-for scenario.
>isn't it expected that you will get junk clicks with a bid like that?
No. Bidding low means less or no clicks, but should not affect traffic quality.
Well I think your experiment more shows that while Open AI is trying to position this as a viable marketing platform, in reality folks with marketing dollars do spend aren’t buying what they’re selling so you’re able to win at pricing far below where they really want/need the market to be.
The cost of clicks tends to rise over time with advertising platforms (Google 'the law of shitty clickthrus'). This effect is very noticeable with Google Adwords, for example. So it makes sense to get in early with a new platform and try and get some traffic, before the big corporates push the prices up.
> ChatGPT recommends bidding somewhere around by £2 per click, but I bid between £0.15 and £0.07 and was still able to get traffic
Did they try bidding more? It's possible they are just only getting the dregs. (In which case the ads would be expensive instead of garbage)
>Did they try bidding more?
OP here. No. The cheapest version of my PerfectTablePlan software is £19.95 + VAT, one time fee. So I would be insane to bid £2 per click.
>It's possible they are just only getting the dregs.
Bidding higher generally means more clicks, but the quality could be worse due to winning bids when your content is less relevant.
If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would be salivating waiting for a call from Sam Altman.
facebook ad targeting is also garbage. They have my entire history since 2004 and they still sometimes: think I'm a woman, think I need things for a newborn, think I'm in the market for "short men clothing" (I'm 6'0"), and so on. Sometimes I get ads for farm equipment (I am a lifelong city dweller).
Now let's be honest: short men clothing is basically modern, "slim fit" clothing; you get that fashionable bare-ankles look with short pants.
And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?
Not sure why, but my ads used to be insanely spot on, now they're meh.
My wife will get ads on Instagram targeting me though.
One day I looked at some retro console, she texted me asking if I was looking at a console, she got like 8 ads for it.
I'm fine with ad targeting being garbage and you should be too.
That means you can't be tracked because it's too stupid to do so.
For what it's worth, the picture at the top of the article is a textbook example of very high accuracy!
Wouldn't it be low accuracy but high precision?
Not if you were aiming for the center.
Strange how this went straight from front page to position 157.
The fact that there is a commercial relationship between OpenAi and YCombinator is surely a coincidence.
Way more comments than points.
Is there any ad targeting that is good?
The main place I see ads is YouTube on iOS. I used to have ad targeting turned off, but I’ve since opted into all of googles tracking and ad-targeting, in attempt to curate the ads I see and improve them.
I’ve had all the Google tracking and ad-targeting turned on for close to a year now. Google still can’t even target me ads that are in English. I can’t read Chinese or Turkish or Spanish but I still get ads in those languages. Most of the ads are still scams or questionably legal products. And nearly all advertisements are blatantly targeted toward the wrong demographics. I get both “you can buy this multi million dollar hotel” and “you can use food stamps at our store”. I sometimes see advertisements for local politicians (same state), which might be targeted, but I just as frequently see ads for politicians I cannot possibly vote for. (opposite side of the country)
Do you have a smart TV or other device that might be selling your bandwidth as a residential proxy?
I get mostly mistargeted ads, but I’ve put a lot of effort into it.
Ads are part of the enshitification of ChatGPT. In the short-term it might offer them some kind of lifeline and I'm sure in their next investor call they'll highlight their revenue from Ads.
But if their competitors (including open-weight models) can offer similar quality and ease of use, Ads is just another reason _not_ to use them.
Ads are responsible for the enshitification of everything. Literally everything.
- Why is online news just partisan rage-baiting? Ads
- Why is real journalism dying? Ads
- Why are your web search results less helpful? Ads
- Why are recipes 2,000 words long? Ads
- Why is social media engineered for scroll-maxxing?
- Why is your car/TV/refrigerator spamming you?
- Why are pharmaceuticals so expensive?
- Why is your population voting for assholes?
Future generations are going to look back at how we live with advertising the same way we look back on leaded gasoline and asbestos.
Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
> Why is real journalism dying? Ads
This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.
I occasionally enjoy well executed ads, like something that’s creative enough to make me curious, but nowadays, I’m seeing a lot of ads on YouTube that’s obviously low-effort AI slop, they are boring, fake, and depressing.
Ads are the hacking of attention. Without attention, ChatGPT cannot exist.
I saw them today in the app and yeah… first idea - enshitification. Ads were cringe. But google works the same way - cringe ads. I use google in 3-4 different languages and it’s completely lost.
It’s wild to me that people click ads.
Advertisements don't need to be clicked to work. Billboards clearly work for reasons other than being clicked.
Do they though? It is often very hard to know with ads. My experience is that most people spending money on ads have no idea if they are getting any sort of return. Are there any studies that show billboard ads work?
BTW That why money off vouchers are so common with ads. Because this is an actual way you can check if the ad is working. Although there are confounding factors - maybe they were going to buy from you before they saw the voucher?
If you asked me to name the companies on the billboards that line the highway I commute on, I couldn't do it.
I don't think any single form of advertising is effective on the whole population.
If you saw a product from a brand on a billboard on your commute, and a product from a brand you've never seen before, you'd probably be able to pick which one you've never seen before.
Have you observed any humans and their decision making capabilities lately? :)
Can confirm. I've spend over $1000 as a test and I see even worse results. Absolute garbage compared even to cheap garbage paid social traffic.
Would be interested to see if the data, if you are prepared to share.