Comment by consensus1
4 days ago
Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly? You could make a pretty solid argument that it does.
4 days ago
Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly? You could make a pretty solid argument that it does.
No, ads are approximately never to your benefit, and if they are, it's entirely by accident. Their entire purpose is to corrupt your preferences or misinform you to the benefit of the advertiser. If you actually wanted to buy the thing, they wouldn't need to spend money on ads (and anyone competent would measure lift over a baseline, not just raw "did people buy the thing" for campaign effectiveness).
If you're to see any ads at all, it is vastly preferable that you see random ads for things that you would never be interested in and that register as pure noise to you. Things you could be convinced to buy, or propaganda that elicits some response (positive or negative) are the worst case to encounter.
The ads I receive in the mail from local grocery stores serve to inform me when stores that I normally don't shop at have something I already want on sale at a better price than my usual stores.
How is this corrupting my preferences or misinforming me?
Maybe you think so, but if Youtube offered a choice between targeted ads or 5x more untargeted I bet that > 90% of people would take the former.
There is no reason we have to make the false choice you present. That is simply Google holding a gun to our heads to encourage us to choose something that is in Google's best interests rather than our own.
The choice should be between X targeted ads or X non-targeted ads. They can still target ads based on the content of the page, no different from how television and print ads worked prior to all of this data collection.
4 replies →
[flagged]
So delusional that targeted advertising (a massively expensive thing to build) makes more money than random advertising, and advertisers are willing to pay a premium, leading to some of the biggest companies on the planet being in the business of targeting advertising! Almost like it's effective at manipulating people into making decisions they wouldn't otherwise make.
And then entirely unsurprisingly, professional propagandists also manage to convince people that the proper reaction to being manipulated is "thank you sir, may I have another?"
3 replies →
Does showing you less ads for things you actually want to buy instead of more random adds serve you directly?
It does until that mechanism is turned against me, as I have to assume it will be.
What does that mean?
I don't want my grocery list sold to my health insurance company, for example.