Online ads may not be as effective as we thought. But we should still worry about manipulation.

[osewalrus]

There's a rather meh star trek episode called Omega Glory where a renegade Starfleet captain thinks he's found a fountain of youth. Turns out people on the planet live longer because natural selection after the nasty biological war they fought bred for healthier, longer-lived people. Or, as McCoy shouts: "People on this planet only live longer because it's natural for them to now!"

Turns out, this may be the case with online advertising, which may not be nearly as effective as folks claim/fear.
https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24

Tl;DR, the platforms and consultants look at total number of clicks for paid links. But this does not take into account how many people would have gone to the site anyway. A number of studies show that eliminating keyword buys in situations where the the website would come up as the top link anyway (such as for EBay) showed virtually no change in traffic. i.e., you got the same click throughs for free you used to be paying for as ads.

Does this mean that all our concern about targeting based on personal information is bunk? Well, maybe not. But it's complicated. This is why we have laws against "payolla." Payolla is the practice of paying radio stations for airtime without disclosing the sponsorship. Why? Because people are more likely to respond favorably to songs that they think are considered good by others (such as the DJs) v. sponsored content.

So it's not like our fears of manipulation are groundless, but they may be much more in line with our traditional concerns about advertising rather than something entirely new.

Comments

[dsrtao]

In the other direction, it turns out that a lot of companies are trying to eke out a margin between how much Google will pay them to display ads minus what Amazon costs them to run the site. Most of these businesses are (a) terrible as business ventures, since any change in policies at AMZN or GOOG could sink them; (b) terribly unethical, because their survival depends on exploiting any loophole; (c) terrible places to work because of pressures from a and b.

Sadly, many news businesses chose that model.

[barking_iguana]

Are you sure that was in Omega Glory? Omega Glory was the episode with the Yangs and Comes and the Kirk reading the preamble of the Constitution.

[osewalrus]

Yes. That's how they end up on the planet. They show up and everyone on the Exeter has been turned into crystal powder. But Captain Tracey is still down on the planet. he stayed long enough to become immune. He's convinced that whatever is keeping him alive is also what keeps the local people living for hundreds of years. Turns out he's wrong.

The locals are the "Komms." They are being overrun by the savage "Yangs" in what Spock calls "a striking example of Hodgkins law of parallel development."

[vettecat]

I never notice online ads - I'm very focused on the content I'm looking for - but I always thought I was an exception. Maybe not.