Whether targeted ads work for actually getting more revenue per ad impression is debatable. Those selling the surveillance infrastructure want you to think that they do, of course, though it has not been impartially shown that an ad targeted at someone whose browsing history, credit card purchases and TV viewing digest that they’re in the target demographic for a product get more conversions than a context-based ad (i.e., if you’re selling gym shoes, buying untargeted ads on fitness forums and such).
I used to work for a big data company and internally we acknowledged that for the targeting to be truly effective we’d have to do a truly creepy amount of behavior analysis. The fact that ads don’t really drive clicks is a dirty little secret in the industry.
I feel like its also pretty easily spotted / avoided / defeated, after a very small amount of knowledge about the industry is understood. Unless there’s an Ad-agent assigned to individuals, I can’t see there being an ad targeted towards me that I wouldn’t immediately note as such.
Oh they’ll be putting “AI” on it as your personal agent soon enough. Undoubtedly already have pushed it through many black box algorithms and machine learning models, so arguably too late.
Like I said, they’d need an agent assigned to a small amount of people. If AI has shown us anything, its that its severely lacking in the “I” part in almost every context.
Well, that’s because it’s the marketing and exec hacks (read: morons) that decided to call it “AI”. Any engineer with a quarter of a braincell left knows better than to call the current generation (or the next several) of ML models et. al. “intelligent”, let alone AI.
An actual AI would be far, FAR more than capable of sorting your silly preferences.
They also charged for the paper. Although I’m not sure of the comparison between the cost of materials, printing, and distribution versus the cost of hosting servers.
Printing for a single city has got to be more than hosting for an entire country
Think of all the people you need to print everything out before the next morning - you need a big enough staff of editors and reporters that you can get everything ready in a short time frame, you need the staff to handle the printing overnight, you need drivers to deliver within a 3-ish hour period and the staff to coordinate and load them up
Meanwhile, for a website, a team of 5 developers/devops could handle all of it. You still need journalists and editors, but they are no longer on the same time frame - they can just release things as they’re ready, and maybe curate an email for the day and what appears on the homepage.
As far as paper and print costs vs hosting costs? If each paper cost 1 cent, were talking like between .01 cent and .0001 cent per page view, maybe even a tenth or hundredth of that. It adds up quickly, but compared to paper and ink?
It’s amazing how newspapers were able to sustain themselves when they only had non-targeted ads
Whether targeted ads work for actually getting more revenue per ad impression is debatable. Those selling the surveillance infrastructure want you to think that they do, of course, though it has not been impartially shown that an ad targeted at someone whose browsing history, credit card purchases and TV viewing digest that they’re in the target demographic for a product get more conversions than a context-based ad (i.e., if you’re selling gym shoes, buying untargeted ads on fitness forums and such).
I used to work for a big data company and internally we acknowledged that for the targeting to be truly effective we’d have to do a truly creepy amount of behavior analysis. The fact that ads don’t really drive clicks is a dirty little secret in the industry.
I feel like its also pretty easily spotted / avoided / defeated, after a very small amount of knowledge about the industry is understood. Unless there’s an Ad-agent assigned to individuals, I can’t see there being an ad targeted towards me that I wouldn’t immediately note as such.
Oh they’ll be putting “AI” on it as your personal agent soon enough. Undoubtedly already have pushed it through many black box algorithms and machine learning models, so arguably too late.
Like I said, they’d need an agent assigned to a small amount of people. If AI has shown us anything, its that its severely lacking in the “I” part in almost every context.
Well, that’s because it’s the marketing and exec hacks (read: morons) that decided to call it “AI”. Any engineer with a quarter of a braincell left knows better than to call the current generation (or the next several) of ML models et. al. “intelligent”, let alone AI.
An actual AI would be far, FAR more than capable of sorting your silly preferences.
They also charged for the paper. Although I’m not sure of the comparison between the cost of materials, printing, and distribution versus the cost of hosting servers.
Printing for a single city has got to be more than hosting for an entire country
Think of all the people you need to print everything out before the next morning - you need a big enough staff of editors and reporters that you can get everything ready in a short time frame, you need the staff to handle the printing overnight, you need drivers to deliver within a 3-ish hour period and the staff to coordinate and load them up
Meanwhile, for a website, a team of 5 developers/devops could handle all of it. You still need journalists and editors, but they are no longer on the same time frame - they can just release things as they’re ready, and maybe curate an email for the day and what appears on the homepage.
As far as paper and print costs vs hosting costs? If each paper cost 1 cent, were talking like between .01 cent and .0001 cent per page view, maybe even a tenth or hundredth of that. It adds up quickly, but compared to paper and ink?
They didn’t that’s why they closed