
Who Do Online Advertisers Think You Are? - iProject
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/magazine/who-do-online-advertisers-think-you-are.html?ref=technology&_r=0&pagewanted=all
======
Resident_Geek
I knew about Google's Ads Preferences page
(<http://google.com/ads/preferences>), which lists the interests Google has
inferred for me. This article taught me about the BlueKai Registry
(<http://bluekai.com/registry/>), which lists the same thing (and a little
more) for BlueKai. Does anyone know of similar sources of information for
other advertising networks?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
In case anyone else has the same problem, the Ads Preferences HTTPS link
(<https://google.com/ads/preferences>) didn't work for me, but the HTTP link
(<http://google.com/ads/preferences>) did.

~~~
Resident_Geek
My bad. Fixed.

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jstalin
This is why I use Adblock, Ghostery, and always-on Private Browsing in
Firefox.

~~~
robryan
If everyone did this though many online products and services would cease to
exist. I would like to think there is a nice middle ground where you could pay
a small amount on services like Facebook and Twitter for them to provide a
completely ad free experience.

It seems companies are reluctant to do this though, I guess they think that
having advertising available across all demographics is more important than
some subscription revenue.

~~~
holri
In the logic of target based ads this is an exact differentation of consumers.
Those that do not want ads do not get them. They may not click on them anyway
so why waste money on displaying them?

~~~
bcoates
Yeah, but it's exactly backwards. You've split your user base into "people who
have the means and inclination to spend money on the internet" and "people who
don't". Which one do you think advertisers would value access to more?

------
inthewoods
What interests me is the first use case the author uses - where he develops a
profile of a Republican by visiting Mitt Romney's website and then sees Romney
ads on other websites. To me this is unlikely to be a RTB - it seems to me to
be more likely based on retargeting. Granted, retargeting can be served via
RTB, but my point is that they likely aren't using demographic or behavioral
data to target that profile - they're more likely simply pushing an ad to
someone that has visited the Romney website before.

Also, Bluekai, who is highlighted here, has some of the worst data on me of
any of the providers - Google is the most accurate (not shocking given the
number of Google services I use). Bluekai has me listed as 60-64 - and I'm old
but not that old.

Finally, I think the article combines two ideas that are really very different
things: RTB and then behavioral profiles. Now the two are connected and inter-
related, but there is nothing that says an RTB-based ad has to be targeted
using behavioral information (as opposed to content-based targeting for
example). And there's nothing to say that a company can't target using
behavioral data but not do it using RTB technology - you could come up with a
behaviorally targeted list and just execute it through direct buys.

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charonn0
_I don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the
more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more
publishers (websites) will earn._

Having complete strangers scrutinize, classify, parcel, and sell my life to
those wanting to sell me things I don't need is not terribly useful from my
perspective.

I don't begrudge any publisher their source of income, but I am not a
commodity.

~~~
Evbn
They don't sell your life, they sell the right to have an ad shown to you. It
is different.

~~~
charonn0
You completely miss my point. I have no problem looking at ads, or with the
publishers selling ad space that obscures 50% or more of a webpage. That's
their prerogative.

I object to having the details of my life collected and monetized by strangers
for other strangers. My vacation plans are no one's business; my political
bent is my own concern; my shoe size is between me and my podiatrist; and I
must absolutely _insist_ that it stays that way.

------
muratmutlu
"Should we worry about ads aimed specifically at us everywhere we go on the
Web and, increasingly, on our mobile devices too? Yes, and not just because
the ads can be invasive and annoying. Real-time bidding also makes the online
marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing companies to send loyalty
points or discounts — or price increases — to individuals based on their
perceived spending power. The travel site Orbitz, after learning that Mac
users spend 30 percent more on hotel rooms than P.C. users, has started to
send Mac users ads for hotels that are 11 percent more expensive than the ones
that P.C. users are seeing, according to a recent Wall Street Journal
article."

Isn't that complaining about ads being intrusive, then complaining about not
getting ads because of targeting?

It's not like Orbitz charge mac users more money by upping the prices only for
them.

It's funny because I did a ton of consumer search at Nokia and spend hours and
hours listening to people talk about advertising on mobile and irrelevancy was
one of the biggest problems. Better targeting saves advertisers money and
should piss users off less.

~~~
Evbn
Interest based targeting may be less annoying. Chasing me around the web
harassing me with retargeting pisses me off.

------
spindritf
> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing
> field, allowing companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price
> increases — to individuals based on their perceived spending power.

Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-
leaning and their authors would like that.

The idea that buyers should be treated equally, like anonymous entities and
their circumstances should have no bearing on price, is something taken
straight out of John Locke's thought experiments.[1]

[1] I have no idea how to link within Google Books so just search this one for
"anchor" <http://books.google.com/books?id=WYXB2hV1AE4C>

~~~
carbocation
> Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each
> according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little
> left-leaning and their authors would like that.

It makes little sense to me to speak about advertisement in Marxist terms. The
goal is to make money for corporations, hardly a social justice-oriented
endeavor.

At any rate, different pricing for serving ads to different people is the
antithesis of treating everyone equally. I recognize this but hardly find it
noteworthy. At the extreme, the "everyone gets the same ads" mentality causes
me to be subjected to ads for diapers and dresses. Comparatively, the ads I
currently get are downright fascinating.

~~~
Evbn
How does a corporation contradict communist economics?

------
cletus
Disclaimer: I work for Google on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These views are
my own and don't express those of my employer.

From where I'm sitting real-time bidding ("RTB") does indeed seem to be the
future of display advertising. Personally I don't see this as a bad thing as
the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the
more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn.

As much as on sites like this there are those who speak of the evils of
advertising, the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of
the Internet can exist.

The article notes:

> In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new service called
> Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send promotions for
> Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched for trips to Spain.

For the record, Google still maintains a strict separation between search and
display.

This quote is bizarre:

> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing
> field,

The New York Times is suddenly concerned with being egalitarian? Really? Also:

> ... based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control.

www.google.com/ads/preferences/

Click "Opt out".

(Side note: where is the Facebook equivalent?)

Another point:

> This is bad news for magazines and newspapers: once advertisers were able to
> track and reach specific consumers, they became less interested in where
> their ads appeared and more interested in who, specifically, was seeing
> them.

Online advertising has the merit of being completely measurable in that you
can determine to a fraction of a cent how much you spent on impressions, how
many of those impressions resulted in a click (resulting in an effective CPC)
and how many of those became customers (effective CPA).

Traditional media is suffering because probably since it's existed--and anyone
who has bought radio, TV or print advertising should be aware of this--is that
the audience numbers are basically a lie. So yes, it's bad news for that lie
to be exposed for those perpetuating the lie I guess.

> For example, by knowing discrete and apparently unconnected facts about you
> — your shirt color, gait, driving habits and the e-mail font you use —
> companies could, using algorithms that sort the profiles of hundreds of
> thousands of people like you, accurately predict what kind of porn you surf.

Say what now? An important point:

> ... none of these classifications was accurate, although Tawakol noted that
> they would become more precise the more I browsed the Web while allowing
> BlueKai cookies on my computer.

The underlying point here is that advertisers aren't interested in you, the
individual, they're interested in you as part of an audience. Note:

> And BlueKai says that its advertising partners can’t identify by name the
> consumers they’re tracking, and they generally don’t want to.

> But it was a place where people could define themselves and be surprised by
> experiences in the future that didn’t reflect preferences they expressed in
> the past.

Really? We're going to wax lyrical about TV advertising in the 1960s now?

~~~
_delirium
> the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of the
> Internet can exist

This is a bit of an overstatement, I think. There is certainly some good ad-
supported stuff, and maybe it's the "vast majority of the Internet" if counted
by sheer volume, but if weighted by information quality, I would put it closer
to maybe half of the Internet. For my own browsing, probably more like 20-30%
of the sites I visit regularly are supported by ad revenue, but I'll admit
that's probably low. The rest are not there primarily to make direct revenue
through selling ad space, though they might be connected to a profit motive in
some other way.

Some in that category: Wikipedia, HN, a whole bunch of *.edu stuff, tumblr,
technical blogs run by companies (MSDN Blogs, Googlers' blogs, lots of
startups' blogs), Amazon, websites run by think-tanks like Cato or Hoover,
arXiv. In fact I think the only ad-supported sites I visit regularly are
newspaper websites, Facebook, StackExchange, and Google's properties.

~~~
Evbn
HN and corporate blogs are all ad supported, just not third-party ad-network
supported.

~~~
lsc
That... is a big stretch. That's like saying my personal blog is ad-supported
because it advertises me. I mean, it would be more correct to call it an ad
than to call it ad-supported. Same with news.ycombinator.com; it does a lot to
advertise ycombinator.com, sure... but calling it ad-supported is really a
stretch from what most people think that phrase means.

I mean, if we are going that far, every article published where the author was
compensated mostly in ego (which is to say, nearly everything written) is ad-
supported.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, that's the caveat I was trying to add with "connected to a profit motive
in some other way". If an SaaS startup writes a technical blog, they're
probably doing it in part because they hope it'll help bring in some more
paying customers. But they aren't typically hoping to monetize the blog
_itself_ as their revenue-generating product, through AdSense or BlogAds or
similar.

------
joejohnson
To call cookies "bits of code" is inaccurate, but I'm being pedantic.

~~~
sliverstorm
Small inaccuracies are perfectly acceptable if they aid in conferring
understanding to the layman.

~~~
lotu
I don't like it because it makes it sound like they are running stuff on my
machine. Which sounds like hacking to the layman. Cookies are closer to name
tags than bits of code.

------
namank
On a related note, Google, Bing, and now Facebook trap us in a custom-me
bubble - only showing search they think are relevant to us. This kind of
information sorting is fine but it makes hard for me to search something
"objectively" - have to go through Incognito or clear cookies, sign out etc...

I think this paradigm will collapse as we become globalised. My question is
when and what will replace it.

~~~
Evbn
Define "objectively".

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wheaties
According to BlueKai I'm:

4-6 yrs old Make 20-29 Rent Am female

Funny, yes. Accurate? Not a chance in hell.

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therandomguy
Why is targeted advertising bad? Would the author rather see irrelevant ads?

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swah
I just saw some Conan O'Brien clips and now they think I'm american.

