Well your point 1 just confirms what the blog post said: you don't need to mine petabytes of data to get ads out to people. Point 5: so what? The post is about tracking, data collection and evaluation in general, not just ads. Butthurt ad industry guy? Point 6 doesn't really excuse all the smaller players responsible for the dozens of trackers on every news outlet. Google doesn't need to buy tracking data from anyone, so they don't have to solve the problem of correlating all that anonymized tracking data with questionable success.
Just because many ads do not use precise targeting does not mean that precise targeting does not work. That is the fundamental problem with this post.
Netflix recommendations are not the same as ad selection. You cannot generalize across such vastly different scenarios, datasets, and incentives, especially because relevance scoring is just a small part of what ad actually gets chosen.
I don't understand what you're saying about point 6 since this is not about Google vs smaller players, but there is definitely a monopoly problem with a single company having all the data.
Butthurt? I'm not 5 years old so no, however I do have more than a decade of experience in the industry, know the CEOs of all the major ad networks and publishers, personally presented to senators on increasing regulation, wrote about adblocking and built one to discover alternative payments, worked on finding and eliminating adfraud, helped build several successful marketing companies, and am willing to have open discussions with hundreds of comments right here on HN. Do you have some questions you would like to ask instead?
> Do you have some questions you would like to ask instead?
For example, regarding smaller players in the ad industry buying from a dozen tracking companies: does it really work? If yes it would either mean you have tremendously good algorithms to correlate anonymized data, or the data isn't really that anonymized to begin with. I mentioned google in the last paragraph because for them it's easy: they can track users better than anyone else and use it to show ads. It's all under the same hood. You dismiss the OP as a complete idiot, but doesn't it sound a least a bit likely that many smaller players just try to be google again here? Oh, google has so much data about the users to do ad targeting, we absolutely must do the same! There are so many places on the web where you have a pretty good idea about the demography of your visitors. Start from there. Most of the versatile places where you don't know who your visitors are are places like google, YouTube, Facebook, twitter, but they already know who their visitors are because they can do their own tracking, they don't need to buy any tracking data. So in the end I'm still wondering why there are two dozen trackers on CNN.com. who is buying all that data?
Late post but I didn't dismiss the OP as an idiot, I'm saying they are ignorant of how things work and extrapolating the state of technology based on visible end results is not accurate in anyway.
As for the rest, I've described this in the previous 2 posts. Precise targeting is possible. Every ad network has their own special focus, and yes many are useless or have been obsolete thanks to an evolving market. Not all of it is about a single visitor identity either. However just because targeting is available does not mean it's always used or always worth the price.
If you're selling toothbrushes, you don't need precise data. If you're selling million-dollar industrial equipment then it's worth paying the money to target the right people in their office. There are 1000s of factors that determine what you see and many are purely business and supply chain related with nothing to do with relevance so more often than not you'll see an ad that only has rough generic/contextual targeting and think the algorithm sucks when in reality nothing was applied in the first place.
