I think there's a very non-trivial chance the person who wrote this article knows much more about advertising than you think: http://www.hilarymason.com/about/
To be fair, it's not clear that Hilary Mason is specifically knowledgeable about on-line advertising. She is undoubtedly very knowledgeable about computer science, big data, and a number of fields in general, but it's possible her major interaction with the specifics of on-line advertising are as an advertisee, either directly or by proxy.
To be clear, I'm not knowledgeable about online advertising. I do understand that the incentives of the advertisers and the users are often opposed, but I was highlighting this as an example of poor product design likely due to optimizing click-throughs, not product experience. :)
I think the notion that poor product design can evolve from abuse of data is an interesting discussion, but unfortunately a) it probably isn't poor product design (what function would you put in the areas of the screen most likely to suffer a misclick?) and b) not at all likely due to optimizing click-throughs. Ironically, the misclick problem is a well known issue in online advertising, and the best way to mitigate it is to use the data to dampen the noise.
There are obviously a number of ad revenue driven pressures on Yahoo Mail's design. The display advertising market is very different from the search engine market. It is only tangentially about the clicks. The biggest pressures are:
"Premium Locations": these aren't necessarily the places that get high click throughs, but rather the locations which are prominently displayed and noticed by the users, which causes them to stand out in a world awash in banner ads. This competes with good UI design, which wants to put important functions in these exact same locations.
"CPM": just getting way higher impression counts. This translates to filling the screen with as many ads as possible, stealing screen real estate and really disrupting eye flow.
"CPA": Lots of ad networks/DSP's try to arbitrage between CPM and CPA. Misclicks don't generally help much with that beyond hindering optimization efforts to use clicks as signals. Mostly what this does to design is encourage "rest points" in applications where users are likely to actually take the time to go all the way through to a conversion (think of it like TV commercial breaks in sports).
"Uniques/F-Cap": You want to raise the bar on the minimum # of impressions seen by every visitor, because those early impressions are far more likely to be people who haven't seen the ad before. Advertisers pay a lot more (10x more is not unheard of) for that. So, there is pressure to spam the visitor with as many impressions as possible before they are likely to leave (which makes it hard to serve ads in a way that is proportional to the value the user derives from the experience).
"View based conversion": The underbelly of the adverting network. In theory this is a good thing. In practice, it creates an incentive to shove ad locations in to the page that the visitor never even notices (ironically the opposite of the problem the article contends).
Some people have apparently gotten the impression I was questioning your credentials, your intelligence, or somehow attacking you personally. At least in terms of intent it couldn't be farther from the truth! While I think your naïveté about online advertising undermines your article, all it might imply about you personally is your curiosity about online advertising is low as compared to other pursuits. If anything, I'd say that is a compliment. If I conveyed or you perceived anything other than that, I certainly apologize.
Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive... because, you know, being a woman isn't some kind of insult.
If it had read, "He's a data geek..." it would have only have been offensive because they got the gender wrong.
"... Perhaps someone felt that it inappropriate to call the author out by name, and didn't feel that referring to them by a completely appropriate gender pronoun was in any way offensive. ..."
I understand the line of reasoning, however the tone of the comments about the article are negative and not up to standard. [1] It is not a question of gender but how to discuss, acknowledge & discuss an authors work in a civil manner.
I agree the tone of many of the comments are not up to standard. I think both mine, and and the one you chose to go after were. Neither of us questioned her professional skills, talents, intelligence, awesomeness etc., just her domain expertise (in a domain which I'd think no one would expect expertise), which seems eminently reasonable given that the only indicators were a lack of said expertise. It seems even more reasonable because she acknowledged that she does not.
You are criticizing the people who are behaving in a civil manner for the behaviour of those behaving uncivilly. Try to focus on the jerks, there's an off chance they might get it.
"... You are criticizing the people who are behaving in a civil manner for the behaviour of those behaving uncivilly. ... Try to focus on the jerks ..."
Yes & no. I'm don't think I'm being that critical, 'why don't you refer to someone by name.' I take your point though. As for focusing on "Jerks", I ignore them. I'd rather point to measured responses like your own illustrating to "Jerks" how to respond.
While I agree that being a data scientist increases the odds one might know a thing or two about online advertising, it's far from a strong indicator, so I'm not sure what your basis for suggesting a "non-trivial chance".
Ms. Mason has confirmed her lack of domain expertise, so I guess that settles it.
In the process of attempting to highlight an important lesson about applying data analysis, she has highlighted another important and related lesson: regardless of the level of one's data analysis expertise, without domain expertise to contextualize the data, it is terribly difficult to do any kind of useful analysis.
I didn't say she was an idiot. Honestly, the way the ad business works sometimes, it makes more sense to idiots than to smart people. ;-)
A lot of people with her background come to the online ad business. While brilliant, they find they have a lot to learn and a lot of assumptions that they need to throw out the window. Fortunately, the brilliant ones have no problems learning so they come up to speed quickly, but this doesn't help them to understand things prior to digging in a bit.
Really? Because nothing in that bio points to that. Actually the whole thing is unbelievably vague and opaque.
And these kind of cutesy oneliner descriptions of one's skills make me cringe: "Simply: I make beautiful things with data".
OK, she works as a "chief scientist" (that's not even a job, for us, old time folks, but anyway) at bitly (a URL shortening service, i.e as far away from a real business as you can get, that aspires to be a "bookmarking service" also.
> a URL shortening service, i.e as far away from a real business as you can get,
Please define 'real business'. What does a company need to have to be a 'real' business? Users? Revenue? Profits? A product that at least some people are willing to pay money for?
I agree that bit.ly is a very simple concept, but I take issue with the disdain in your post - even URL shortening stops being straightforward once you expand from n = 1 to n = 10,000,000. And bit.ly does a lot more than 'just' that.
This reminds me of McCain's 'real America'. You may not like {NoVa, these kinds of startups} and you may think that they don't capture the 'true' spirit of {Virginia, business}, but at the end of the day, their {votes, dollars} count just as much as 'real' {America, business}.
You may not think Hilary's qualified to talk about the details of Yahoo's particular advertising model, but don't extend that into what's bordering on an ad-hominem attack against a very legitimate startup, as well as a key figure at said startup.
>Please define 'real business'. What does a company need to have to be a 'real' business? Users? Revenue? Profits? A product that at least some people are willing to pay money for?
Revenue and eventually profits. Even if "url shortening" is a "real business", it still is in the very far outskirts of "businesness". A very marginal value adding service, that exists solely because of some very marginal deficiencies of other services. Even Twitter has trouble monetizing, a "url shortening service" 100 times more so.
>even URL shortening stops being straightforward once you expand from n = 1 to n = 10,000,000.
I fail to see how. Even a simple setup can handle 10,000,000 shortened urls with aplomb. And url shortening is the most sharding friendly use case you can get, ie linear scaling is trivial in a url shortening service.
>You may not think Hilary's qualified to talk about the details of Yahoo's particular advertising model, but don't extend that into what's bordering on an ad-hominem attack against a very legitimate startup, as well as a key figure at said startup.
Well, she may or may not be qualified. I just pointed out that the page the parent pointed to as proof of her competence on the matter doesn't _prove_ her qualifications at all.
[Disclaimer: I have decades of first-hand knowledge of Hilary's awesomeness, going back to when we were CS students together in college. So yeah, I'm defending my friend.]
I'd like to ask you to think twice before publicly questioning someone's credentials like this. Whatever your intentions, picking on someone's CV just because of a blog post you disagree with is not only rude, but it sends a message -- particularly to women in tech -- that if they speak publicly, if they offer up their opinion, they will be attacked not about the content of their point but about their competence to speak at all. I believe this kind of attack has real consequences on our field, and I would urge everyone to show everyone the respect they'd want for themselves.
>it sends a message -- particularly to women in tech -- that if they speak publicly, if they offer up their opinion, they will be attacked not about the content of their point but about their competence to speak at all.
Oh, don't worry about that. I'm an equal opportunity insulter! I didn't even care that she is a woman or not while making my point. Nor do I think that women in tech need special treatment. We all get what we all get. Do you see exchanges between males being any more courteous?
Notice also how I avoided to speak about their opinion on Yahoo at all -- they might or might no be 100% correct.
I only responded to the statement by some parent poster, that her CV "proves" that she is especially knowledgable in the ads field.
At a small company with specific goals, there's no implication of doing "'science' in general". I can buy that the idea of being chief scientist at, say, IBM or Google or Microsoft is a little fluffy, but if you're a startup focusing on one goal that is a little beyond what the scientific community knows how to do in theory, it's entirely reasonable to have a position in charge of guiding and directing (and performing) research to that goal and keeping up with the state of the field.
It's largely equivalent to a PI role of a university research project, except that there are things going on in the company other than pure research and so there are chief officers of other things too. Nobody thinks that "primary investigator" is a fluffy title on the grounds that people don't do investigation in general; it's clear they're investigating specific things.
You say "Nobody does 'science' in general", but you are wrong. Many people work at organizations that have a broad range of scientific pursuits in a broad range of fields of study. The Chief Scientist's job is "ensuring that [the organization's] research programs are widely regarded as scientifically and technologically well founded and are appropriate for their intended applications".
Dude, Amgen and a ton of other biotech/pharma firms have "Chief Scientists" or "Chief Scientific Officers" on staff. Sure, they work in specific fields or specific departments, but that is absolutely a valid and commonly used title.
Edward Tufte makes the exact same argument and has a book entitled 'Beautiful Data,' and NO ONE says that about him. Also, while I applaud your use of quotes as rhetorical device to discredit Hilary Mason and her job title, I respond better to well-reasoned arguments.
May I encourage you to watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL3DWcBsPU4
Now imagine her saying, "Simply: I make beautiful things with data." Does that still read cutesy to you?
I might also suggest perusing her GitHub code, but I wouldn't want to alarm you, what with all this newfangled technology and rapid motion.
