

Breaking news: advertsing company wants your personal information - shawndumas
http://www.marco.org/2011/06/29/google-plus

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Kylekramer
_Breaking news: a huge advertising company would like you to give them as much
of your personal information as possible and encourages you to use their
services more frequently, for more reasons, and for longer durations each time
so they can show you more ads and make more money from the advertisers._

I agree with most of this (since it basically says "I dunno, I don't like
Google, they have a slim chance of creating a successful social network but
there is a chance", otherwise known as "no shit, Sherlock"). But why is
advertising depicted so deplorable by all these tech pundits? I honestly don't
get why these people lionize the idea of creating good products sold for money
and vilify the idea of creating good ads sold for money.

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stephth
Perceptually, ads don't offer value to the users experience, quite the
contrary. This sums it up nicely:

 _Another salient difference: Google: Thanks for looking at 100s of ads you
hate. Apple: Thanks for buying 100s of dollars of stuff you love._

[https://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/8101850288606412...](https://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/81018502886064128)

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Kylekramer
But if Google does its job, ads do offer value to the user. I hate bad ads as
much as anything in the world, but the whole point of Google is to create good
ads. And I think that is a noble goal.

~~~
stephth
I'm not arguing if it's noble or not. But how often does an ad on Google add
value to you as a user? I'm genuinely curious.

~~~
nl
The right ad, for the right product, at the right time adds huge value to me
as a user.

If I'm looking to buy a specific product, have finished researching it and now
know what I want then I don't really care if I get the product via an ad, via
an unpaid link, or via walking to the shop. It comes down to price,
availability, and service and if I'm delivered that via an ad I'm happy.

It's called perfect advertising[1][2] and - while no one is there yet - Google
is doing more to make it happen than any other company I'm aware of.

[1] <http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/ad-perfect.html>

[2] <http://nicklothian.com/blog/2010/08/25/perfect-advertising/>

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jeffchuber
Just wrote this on my blog, figured i'd copy over

First of all–why do Facebook and Google care so much to canvas the web with
little buttons to encourage users to share content? In fact–why do they care
if users share content at all? Are they really that loving of the human race
that they are doing so solely for our benefit? Of course not.

A little background:

\- Facebook and Google know an inordinate amount of data about you - they
track, store, and interpret every move you make through their services with
the goal of figuring out who you are, mainly to sell to you.

\- But this wasn't enough, so Facebook introduced the Like button and Google
+1. Now Facebook and Google can track your every move on the web - regardless
of whether you interact with the button. Companies claim they delete this
data, but only after they fully interpret it or extrapolate it into
descriptive data.

\- The problem that Facebook and Google still face however - is that they
collect massive amounts of data–but have a heck of a time monetizing
it–because they essentially spied to get it in the first place. So what is the
solution? Well, if the user actively shares the content–especially in a public
realm but also privately, that user has consciously connected themselves to
that content and monetization becomes easy. (This is why Gmail ads are creepy,
but discounts from Foursquare checkins are welcome)

more analysis here: <http://knowit.posterous.com/google-a-reaction>

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Vitaly
I don't understand all the fuss about personalized ads. really. If Im going to
see any ads I prefer them to be more relevant to me, not less. And if I do see
something interesting and click I don't mind someone getting paying for it.

~~~
seabee
An upside to more precisely targeted advertising is that it lowers the cost of
advertising, by way of reducing the number of eyeballs on an ad. A website
with 1 million uniques can sell the space for $X to a big national business to
whom it will be relevant to 30% of the userbase. Or, it could be divvied up
between 20 local businesses from each user's location, selling the space to
each for $0.1X, and being relevant to 50% of users. The website gets twice as
much ad money, smaller businesses can afford to advertise, and users get
slightly better ads.

Is this really a bad thing?

~~~
uxp
I agree and do not think that model of advertising is a bad thing at all. It
is something I find valuable as a user.

I think that Marco is more complaining about how the advertising company in
question figures out that you are you at that IP address and computer
combination. It's the back end analytics they employ that is building and
refining a database of people that continually use their products, of which
the users either can't see, access and review, or are ignorant of in the first
place. Being helpless is something we all fear as humans, and not having any
say as to what kind of information may be in that database scares some people.
Is it something that we all should be aware of? Probably. Should it keep us up
at night? Probably not. +1 or Google+ helps them refine who they think we are,
but really, they don't care who any of us are individually, they care about
what will interest us next.

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riordan
And here I was thinking this was a post about the MySpace deal.

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gasull
Please, remove "breaking news" from the title.

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walrus
The "breaking news" part is meant as a joke. The author is using it to
indicate that they think it's obvious why Google made Google+.

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william42
Didn't Google+ set up a feature so that you can add someone who doesn't have
Google+ and it will send them your posts, etc. using email? Precisely for this
reason?

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flyt
Who uses email? Not anybody under 21.

~~~
rfrey
_Who uses email?_

22 year olds who were 21 last year, but graduated and have jobs this year.

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ignifero
For all the rambling, Google adwords is still more effective, (ergo more
lucrative) than Facebook advertising. That's because google knows a lot more
than facebook knows about you. We literally tell them what we think every time
we search. Facebook will have to devise a mind-reading device to beat that.

And, imho, Google does not feel threatened by facebook. They have done nothing
to harm facebook ads. On the contrary, facebook has banned Adsense from 3rd
party applications.

