
After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue - chrisxcross
https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/
======
bitofhope
I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of
targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even
unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant,
especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like
to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

~~~
MarkMc
I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant
long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having
intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff?
John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the
gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael
is overweight but has just gone on a diet. Are such details of no significance
determining what ads to show these people?

Having said that, I'm constantly surprised by how bad Google is at targeted
advertising. For example, today when I visit nytimes.com I see an ad from
Google _with the ad text in French_. Hey Google, despite my recent visit to
Paris _I don 't speak French_ \- maybe your AI experts could analyse my 13
years of Gmail and search history to figure that out!

PS: I'm a Google shareholder, so my confirmation bias is in the other
direction :)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you
> to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary
> is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and
> likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a diet.
> Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these
> people?

It's possible that some combination of efficient markets, semi-
inaccurate/incomplete tracking data and chaos theory combines to make it
mostly irrelevant.

So Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series, but advertising to
him is useless because he has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series. Whereas
Larry has had the same job for ten years, and the same Ford for ten years, but
if you put a luxury car ad in front of him it may get him to take a test drive
and actually create a new customer.

The data says Mary is single and goes to the gym every day, but it only thinks
she's "single" because she's in a committed long-distance relationship and
isn't interested in dating anyone else. And she's a fitness expert who is
willing to spend her time researching fitness products, so she already knows
everything there is to know about those products, already buys the ones she
wants, and advertising them to her isn't going to create any new exposure.
Whereas Jane never goes to the gym, so you might actually sell her a gym
membership or a piece of fitness equipment because she doesn't already have
one or know anything about it yet.

John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up, but he has also known exactly
what he's going to do for years. Whereas he has a third cousin whose wedding
is coming up and has no idea what to get, so you should be showing him ads for
toasters and flatware rather than jewelry and chocolate.

In general, you may do better to advertise your stuff to the people who aren't
already interested in and knowledgeable about it. Which actually looks kind of
a lot like random scattershot rather than targeting.

~~~
jrobn
Show of hands. How many people have clicked on an ad and bought something
directly related to the ad?

I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After
I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months
afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe
clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no
intrest in. I think targeted ads is the biggest con no of our age.

~~~
mschuster91
Haha, similar. I was shopping around for a Sony mirrorless camera a year ago.
Ended up with the model I actually had in mind in the first place (A7S2 for
its supreme low light capability), but shit am I hounded on the Internet
either for Sony cameras or accessories. And there's no way I know of to get
rid of it! And for what its worth even Facebook and Instagram (at least the
latter, I only use on my tablet in the app!) showed me camera ads.

This is annoying and, when one thinks about the implication that _everyone and
their dog_ knows who you are, scary.

~~~
jen20
Would an ad blocker not get rid of most of it? I rarely see any ads these days
with Ghostery running.

------
pjc50
This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what
if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?

~~~
cyborgx7
I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software
engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to
society.

~~~
BoorishBears
And all the other software developers working on things directly and
indirectly funded by that industry should what?

Take up knitting?

~~~
darkpuma
Say what you want, but sweaters don't spy on people.

~~~
throwawaymath
Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the
software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we
stopped serving ads."

I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think
they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at
play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which
reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this
moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software
engineers or radically reduce the industry.

Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking
away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least
you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you
want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital
advertising, you can't _realistically_ tell software engineers to take up
knitting.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
As Upton Sinclair so aptly observed " _It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!_
"

There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before
the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line-
of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.,
none of these things depend on ads. If you can't see that there is plenty of
things to do for software developers to do if ads are curtailed, you need to
broaden your horizons.

~~~
BoorishBears
The problem isn't _no one_ will find work.

It's that there was a thriving core decades ago that supported a fraction of
the people the software industry supports today.

> Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop
> apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.

All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has
never experienced the moments ads go away.

No industry, let alone some niche in tech, would be unaffected if Google and
their ad-revenue driven efforts dried up tomorrow morning.

If you can't see that there is plenty fewer things to do for the economy to do
if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has
> never experienced the moments ads go away._

Such hyperbole; computers are embedded in every aspect of daily life now.

Moreover, even if by some miracle you happened to be correct, propping up the
adtech software industry does not justify its negative externalities any more
than preserving tobacco jobs justifies the continued sale of cigarettes and
subsequent deaths or preserving coal jobs justifies the pollutants produced
and its subsequent deaths.

------
blakesterz
“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in
Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,”
he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting
capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the
contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”

I wonder if smaller sites could do the same thing or this is only working so
well because they're the NYT?

~~~
nopriorarrests
It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT. They can get sweet
"branding" dollars from advertisers, and with branding nobody cares about
return on money spent.

Smaller sites have zero chance to strike a deal with large agencies who are
serving large brands. So their only chance to increase ad revenue is to offer
targeting, to improve viewability (aka put banners on top), and to hope that
they will get enough of retargeting dollars.

EDIT: and once you think of it, people from Europe who are reading NYT is
targeting option in itself. Most probably they are affluent, english-speaking,
etc. If you are large luxury brand, this is all you need.

~~~
apexalpha
This comment makes no sense to me. First of all: do you have any source for
your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are
NYT" other than your gut feeling?

Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work
together. Smaller sites now also don't do targeted advertising; they just hire
Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-
targeted ads.

About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you
'target' an entire audience, not an individual. Same for newspapers (on
paper), TV, magazines, books, billboards in certain area's...

~~~
nopriorarrests
>do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working
so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling?

6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.

>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work
together.

Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a
small guy and not having any targeting.

> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the
> same with non-targeted ads.

This is not how it works.

If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your
site -- right.

After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad
networks with user cookie.

If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested
in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy.
5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.

If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in
him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go
unmonetized.

>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked;
you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.

nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target
individual, just as in example above.

If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform,
basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad-
tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as
compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.

And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these
days.

~~~
Tsubasachan
Well I don't know much about the whole cyber economy but I don't think smaller
sites are somehow entitled to advertising spending.

If you run a website you are going to have to work hard to get Volkswagen to
put ads on your site. Explain to them why they should care. The NYT started
out small too.

------
bunderbunder
Wild speculation: What if cutting off the ad exchanges was a dose of quinine
for the New York Times?

NYT is a premium venue for people who want to advertise, because its regular
readers (especially the ones who don't live in New York) tend to have above-
average disposable income. Because of that, the NYT _should_ be able to charge
a premium for advertising with them.

But if they opt into the ad exchanges, then they've given ad exchanges a
signal they can use to more easily track who is a regular NYT reader.
Advertisers could use that to target NYT readers without ever actually
advertising on the NYT's website - they can follow them somewhere cheaper, and
advertise there instead.

~~~
soared
I'm not clear how that would work. How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable
advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?

~~~
tivert
> How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers
> or the NYT website?

tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to
profile its audience, then use that profile to target the _same_ audience on
_cheaper_ sites.

I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the
economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is
expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the
expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that
audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart
advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running
"research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target
that same audience on low-quality sites.

So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages
clickbait and memes in its place.

~~~
soared
This used to be possible but every reputable publisher and exchange doesn't
allow it anymore, mostly for this reason.

~~~
bunderbunder
I thought part of the problem with the ad exchanges was that they're very hard
to police, so what they officially don't allow has limited bearing on what
actually happens.

~~~
soared
Typically an ad will go through multiple vendors (dsp, exchange, ssp, ssp,
etc) and then to the publisher. One of these will catch it, and if not a
publisher as big as NYT has tools in place to catch it.

But yes things can slip through, but its mostly unapproved creative (gambling,
etc) rather than code which is easy to catch.

------
Nasrudith
I have long been bothered by the superficiality of advertising. At this point
I have gotten the impression that much of advertising is the art of fooling
oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others. As long
as there is a success and they are advertising it is stop self reflection and
claim victory.

Annoy persistent customers with ads? It means it is driving retention and not
that they had to get milk and knew you were an immediate better option than
the alternatives.

Not receive as many sales during a recession when people cut back and you are
forced to cut back on ads? Cutting ads brought this and not!

Clearly it has some impact given the derth of businesses without any but it is
so entangled that it stinks of being driven by self-serving superstition more
than concrete impacts. I would guess abstractly modeling awareness and
desirability as separate concepts for one. No matter how much you advertise
people will not want an air freshener that dispenses Ebola in their living
room.

I know my own biases towards an annoying outgroup, that I am not equipped to
derive a more logically rigorous and complete proof (let alone actionable and
doing adequate in the field never mind better) but it feels as if the whole
field should use way more mathematical rigor and self reflection.

------
skilled
I can't be the only one who thinks behavioral targeting is a bit creepy?

This has happened to me at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years: I go to a
supermarket or a store that I have never been to, I do shopping and come back
home. After a few hours, I pick up my phone to check Email/Facebook, only to
find myself staring at an advert for a product that's sitting in my fridge.

I mean, come on... The first time this happened I thought it was a funny
coincidence, but it has happened with products that I did not bring home
either. I can't be the only one?

And this is my point precisely as to why behavioral ads suck. They make you
realize just how much companies are spying on you and using your data to feed
you crap. Would I really want to have any part in this kind of an endeavor?
Let's be real here.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I bought a Casper mattress around a year ago and the websites I visit are
_still_ full of ads for mattresses. How many mattresses do they think I need,
anyway!?

~~~
wlesieutre
Funny you mention them, because I've only ever heard of Casper in podcasts,
one of the few remaining non-targeted digital ad slots.

Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting, but that's no different
from "reads X magazine" in offline media. No creepy tracking required.

~~~
tivert
> Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting

It doesn't, except to the adtech targeters who want to muddy the water.

Ad targeting in this context means individualized targeting based on
individualize tracking and data collection, full stop.

------
cm2012
It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so
confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted
ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

~~~
tivert
> It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post
> so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with
> targeted ads...

Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair
quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding
it!").

That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are
likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the
people who lack that bias also have less knowledge.

What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to
be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the
NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the
self interest, and educate the rest of us.

~~~
kevinh
> Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair
> quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to
> understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding
> it!").

It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not
listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like
you're making an appeal against authority.

~~~
tivert
> It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not
> listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like
> you're making an appeal against authority.

You could, but mainly against things like billing practices and perhaps the
necessity of certain procedures where there might be a conflict of interest.

------
c3534l
I'm no advertising expert, but I have seen a number of stories over the years
of companies being disillusioned by the promise of targeted ads. One common
thread I've noticed is that most people don't have a targeted product and a
targeted message. Most products generally have broad appeal and a lot of ad
campaigns work by changing the general perception of a product.

Advertising in the New York Times in general is already targeted in some
fashion (you know the basic demographic of New York Times readers), and if you
want to advertise laundry detergent there's not a lot to gain from knowing a
person's exact age and the gender of all his siblings siblings and the top
keyword searches he made on Pornhub. Logically speaking, it seems for targeted
advertising to be worth it, you'd need an unusually high response to
advertising among a very narrow selection of people who can be identified as
such, and that these people don't have an obvious place where they can be
found.

In the case of the New York Times, that means you have a product whose message
is going to be wasted on the majority of the population; who can only be
communicated with through a general interest publisher like the New York
Times, but not a website or conference dedicated to that thing; but who can
none the less be easily identified through invasive and secretive tracking
data, but not through what news stories they're viewing; who will be very
responsive to advertising (so not people who are domain experts in a
particular hobby or career and will choose a product by intentionally seeking
information on that product and rationally weigh their alternatives); and who
are a large enough group that it's even worth putting together an advertising
campaign.

And how responsive are people to ads even on a base level anyway? Award-
winning campaigns like "You Got Milk" had massive impact on culture and
awareness, but didn't drive sales.

With so many hurdles, targeted advertising seems like something that provides
only marginal and diminishing returns. Newspapers seem like just about the
worst place to benefit from violating user privacy. It's like trying to sell
Linux dev ops software by asking a top 40 radio station to play ads for it
after specific songs.

------
buboard
They are dancing around the issue avoiding to state the revenue that they had
from EU targeted advertising. This is NYtimes, they attract american
advertising and are primarily targeted at americans. They don't even rely on
advertising anymore, they have subscribers. Their story is not very telling
for everyone else. Anecdotally, since switching to contextual ads in may my
adsense revenue has fallen by ~50% :
[https://i.imgur.com/Ec5LwZg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Ec5LwZg.jpg)

------
jillesvangurp
This does not surprise me. A few things that I know about the ad business:

\- There are a lot of players in the market

\- Most of them oversell their ability to actually target effectively; I
actually know some sales people in this space. Bla bla, machine learning, bla
bla bla algorithms, bla bla bla smoke and mirrors.

\- Especially the smaller players tend to not have usable profiles on the vast
majority of users for reasons of not having existed long enough or not having
enough customers to have actually captured enough relevant data.

\- Any new ad company has to fake it for quite some time until they actually
have enough data. And with GDPR, that data is now a lot harder to come by
legally.

\- Some of ad companies are fraudulent in the sense that they overcharge their
customers for clicks that never happened. E.g. bot traffic is a big revenue
driver for ad providers and most of them conveniently can't tell the
difference between a bot and a user they supposedly profiled.

So, what just happened is that the NYT cut off most of the worst offenders in
this space and ended up with better quality ad providers with better
conversions (even without profiling).

Profiling is actually only needed if you have lots of ads competing for the
same space. If you reduce the number of ads, the need for profiling goes away.
Also, you compensate for bad profiling this way since more (random) people
will see your ad. So previously under-performing ads might actually benefit
from being shown to random people as opposed to some silly algorithm that uses
bad/incomplete profile data to take the wrong decisions.

So what the NYT figured out is that they are better served by a small number
of high value ads shown to random people than a great many low quality ads
from low quality providers targeted to a handful of their users.

Targeting still has a place in this market but it needs to be consensual;
which is going to be a tough sell to end users.

------
arendtio
What I found most interesting about the 'block Europe' movement among news
sites: If the news sites favor their own revenue over the peoples right for
privacy, what are my expectations towards the information they serve?

I mean, if most news sites are getting their biggest revenue via online
targeting, who am I expecting to report abusive behavior among ad networks?

~~~
Kalium
You're right! News outlets consistently choosing to favor their own revenues
over a basic human right to private is _very_ surprising.

Perhaps they made a choice that looks the same from the outside, but could
perhaps be very different from the inside? GDPR implementation is rarely as
cheap, straightforward, or easy as some of its adherents might have you think.
It can be a large, difficult, expensive undertaking. It may be worth bearing
in mind that not every journalistic outlet has a sizable, disciplined,
competent technical organization or the financial wherewithal to acquire one
rapidly. These days, running a newspaper is famously a poor business.

Might it be possible that organizations, faced with a choice between an easy
way to cut some costs and a potentially non-trivial investment for marginal
return, might in some circumstances opt for the former?

Again, you're absolutely right that this looks like a crass choice between
naked greed and basic human rights. It's just possible that it might be more.

------
pacbard
The likely process at play here is cutting out the middle man from ad
placement.

Before GDPR, a company would have likely contacted an ad agency to target the
population that reads the NYT. Ads would then be sold to a pool of websites
that included the NYT. After GDPR, this is no longer possible as the
individual websites have stopped sharing targeting information with the ad
agency. The only solution available to the same company is then to buy
directly from the NYT (and maybe a few other big websites) rather than
“syndicate” the ads through the agency.

It would be interesting to know how ad placements changed pre/post GDPR and
how the ad revenue distribution shifted across different websites.

~~~
kijin
Cutting out the middlemen and their asinine trackers might also help reduce
the number of third-party scripts and random HTTP requests on the page. This
will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to help
increase revenue.

~~~
mschuster91
> This will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to
> help increase revenue.

Most ad loaders actually run async these days, cutting out middlemen/trackers
doesn't help you for time-to-first-readable-content. Biggest culprit there are
expensive assets like dozens of different fonts/variation combos, pre-roll
video ads and uncompressed images.

~~~
kijin
Ad-infested pages often feel sluggish even after all the readable content has
loaded. It feels like the page hasn't finished loading yet.

After all, it takes CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to run scripts and load images in
the background. The difference is especially noticeable on mobile, and it's
even worse when the scripts trigger redraws or mess with the scrolling.

------
tuacker
Reading this makes me happy as I'm currently working on a service [0] (not
available yet) to allow sites to do this. The goal is to facilitate and make
ad selling/scheduling easy while having websites/etc. serve the ads
themselves, ensuring no tracking (by my service) is possible.

A lot of people are already doing direct sales via mail and then work out a
way to get paid somehow, which can be cumbersome. Hoping to make that easier,
while also improving the bad, intrusive behaviour around ads.

[0] [https://www.adsfromsource.com](https://www.adsfromsource.com)

------
nekopa
I toyed around for awhile with an idea I called Gadfly. Basically it's an idea
for complete opt in advertising. It would have a dashboard for setting up what
ads I want to see. So I could put in friends birthdays, things they like, and
around that time get relevant ads of things to buy that they may like. Or I
could say that I need a new laptop, and while I browse see relevant ads for
what I want. I was hoping to make ads work for me, as I do understand 1 big
reason for marketing, letting me know things that I want are available.

~~~
IshKebab
While that idea would never work (who is going to bother with that faff rather
than just googling laptops?) it does also show why Google can make so much
money from ads.

------
tomrod
This is not terribly surprising. Ad exchanges work because network effects
allow for improving small content providers increased effectiveness in selling
their space. If you are a large content producer you have enough people
seeking to advertise.

However, I have concerns about the economic efficiency (broadly speaking), as
well as the dynamic optimality of advertising (though, admittedly, this is a
second order concern to me!).

------
Tade0
Here's an interesting 2nd order effect:

I switched off most of the stuff I could after GDPR went into force, so at
first glance it seemed that I started getting trash.

That was until I saw a banner with a unappealing gray background with a
fragment of a poem.

It was an ad. For a poem. This one specifically:
[https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2009/7/12/age-of-
asininity.html?...](https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2009/7/12/age-of-
asininity.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI18aJkubq3wIVCQvgCh3UeQIdEAEYASAAEgLJ0PD_BwE)

No way in hell I would discover such a thing had my ads been targeted and
personalised, since those usually are reactive, so they show e.g. stuff you
recently bought(meaning: been searching for recently).

------
ComputerGuru
*in Europe. American readers, it seems, are still subject to targeted advertising.

------
the_watcher
Isn't this an example of regulations helping established players? Sure, the
NYT is able to direct sell ads, but an upstart publisher can't. That doesn't
necessarily mean that GDPR's pros don't outweigh the cons, but "The New York
Times can direct sell ads" isn't exactly evidence of "Anyone can avoid GDPR
having an impact on ad revenue"

------
jgalt212
For premium publishers such as the NY Times, I'm not surprised there isn't a
drop off in revenue when targeted ads were dropped.

They are pretty much all high value visitors (from an economic perspective).

------
eli
Building a quality brand with a quality audience and finding advertisers who
believe in you generates more revenue than participating in an exchange that
treats ad impressions as a commodity. Go figure.

------
pornel
Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users? Exchanges
can tag NYT's customers, and then sell the same audience, but on other,
cheaper properties.

------
porpoisely
Ad revenue is growing because the economy ( both in the US and europe ) has
been improving, Trump news boost and because the NYTimes/et al has strong-
armed tech companies into giving them preferential treatment. The NYTimes and
other large news companies have been taking market share from smaller
companies like Vox as they push tech companies to drive traffic to themselves
over smaller players. Whether it is a temporary bump or has legs, we will have
to see. Not sure what GDPR has to do with anything since the ad revenues had
been growing before GDPR.

------
manigandham
I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and
a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing
for the same pool of ad dollars.

There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most
EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead,
and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less
money in the overall market.

This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players (advertisers
and publishers). EDIT: curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here.

~~~
thatguyagain
I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say,
dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind
of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

~~~
manigandham
Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's
why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for
the right user wherever they are across the web.

Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns
running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and
radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels that get them.

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mook
Why can't middlemen still exist, just without the individual targeting? Can't
sites still self-report their categories (so that, say, a dog grooming site
would say they should get dog ads)?

~~~
manigandham
They can and they do, that's what ad networks are. There are plenty of ways to
group sites by category and readership without individual targeting but
middlemen add percentage costs to the ad spend which the industry has been
slowly pushing out.

The bigger issue is that fine-grained targeting is still wanted so if you
remove 3rd-party tracking then advertisers will go towards the biggest sites
that can supply it via their own 1st-party tracking. Even then it's still hard
to work with many vendors so even more of the money is now going to Google and
Facebook who can just do it all with better data than anyone else.

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soufron
« It’s the eeeend of the woooorld »

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StreamBright
With other words GDPR does not make ad based companies less profitable.
Amazing, thank you EU!

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paulie_a
Why is the New York times...key words being New York even paying any attention
to the GDPR?

I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.

~~~
mschuster91
> I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.

Given that they likely have paying EU customers for subscription, they operate
in the EU area. Which means they _can_ be subjected to GDPR. Enforcement would
be difficult, of course, but not impossible (think of seizing credit-card
payments or bank transfers for sales proceedings of printed NYT in Europe).

And GDPR violation fines can be massive.

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dmitriid
Typical modern-day “journalism”.

“A scramble to implement GDPR, last-minute scramble to inplement GDPR when it
arrived in May” vs “it won’t be a scramble in the US, as companies will have
until 2020 to prepare”.

These companies similarly had two years to prepare. And I’m glad they took the
hit for not doing so. I’m also glad they’re discovering that selling private
info left and right isn’t the only way to earn money with ads.

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mlthoughts2018
Meanwhile, NYT experiments with predicting readers’ emotional state and using
that information to target ad placement...

[https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-
new-y...](https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-york-
times-targeting-ads-mood/)

NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Yup. uBlock Origin blocks 20 requests, and PrivacyBadger blocks another 7
requests...I wouldn't visit nytimes.com without those installed.

