a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  1932 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google: Building a more private web

Fuck relevancy. If I want to look at bathing suits in march and april I'll fucking look up bathing suits in march and april. I don't want anyone to auction off a corner of my screen for the right to show me bathing suits. I don't buy products based on who's trying the hardest to get me to buy them I buy the based on what works best for me and there's absolutely no link between what advertisers want and what I want.

"D&D dice sets" are an easy thing to target. Go to Amazon. Search for "D&D dice sets." Turn off adblocking and go to the Washington Post. Dollars to donuts the ads will be for D&D dice sets and that's if you have all your trackers off.

Here's the problem: generally, the products I want are niche enough that the people selling them can't afford to advertise to me at all while the products I need are broad enough that literally any other kind of advertising is more effective. That's the other dirty little secret of online advertising: it fucking sucks. The reason outdoor persists, the reason broadcast persists, the reason print persists is we have vastly higher retention for shit that's in our field of view than shit that's on our phones so online advertising will continue to be cheap and useless and annoying. You are literally better off putting a coupon in someone's junk mail than you are putting it in their Facebook feed and you are better off putting it in someone's email than you are putting it in their junk mail which is why email spam is so awful.

"Advertising" is a fundamentally terrible business model.