In every other case, we don't know how many people really saw the ad, we don't know whether or not it was targetted the way we thought it was (let alone properly), we don't know what else happened between seeing the ad and possibly making a purchase, and...
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
... we don't even know if a purchase occurred! (We can't distinguish between misclicks on banner ads, curiosity clicks, and clicks that actually lead to sales.)
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
Now, in the short term, every individual in the chain except the ultimate end point knows how to make some money, and has ideas about how to make more. The ad network can increase data points, changing (but not necessarily improving) targeting.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
The clickbait site can break things into a greater number of pages, or be more misleading or salacious, or hire people on mechanical turk to click ads all day. The folks with a physical product they'd like to get paid for are SOL though.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
Part of this is that they don't have access to the right data sources -- they just have really noisy shit.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
Part of this is that advertising is adversarial: best case scenario is that constantly irritating everyone with shit they don't want is occasionally interrupted by something they do want, and they are not sufficiently creeped out & so buy it from you instead of digging in heels.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
So good models don't exist, and models degrade almost immediately because even the dumbest crowd is smarter than the smartest adtech on average (having direct access to many of their preferences).
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
Much as a subprime mortgage scheme relies upon the expectation that eventually most people are going to pay their bills, ad-driven revenue models rely upon the expectation that people will buy physical products because of advertising. And that's mostly not true.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
So, if you have an information product (like journalism) and you know there's a market for it, subscriptions make a lot more sense: even if they make you less money in the moment, they are not prone to an eventual sudden collapse when unrelated industries realize which half of...
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Replying to @enkiv2 @eigenrobot
... the advertising budget it wasted (or decide, due to general economic factors, to gamble less).
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I have a bunch of thoughts about all of this and while I cannot or will not share them but I appreciate all of this and agree with at least half :)
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