Someone posted this over on Reddit right when it happened and I apparently saved it. I’m cleaning out my bookmarks and came across it. I hought you’d like to see why it’s good news that we found Lemmy.
Edit: I took a screenshot in case it gets deleted.
Well A) this is not going to get deleted cause B) it’s not that big relative to most advertising.
Previously you could target ads by subreddit or interest (which I’m assuming was subscribers of a subreddit when they were on an unrelated subreddit)
This allows for ads to be served based in keywords on keyword targeting. So a car company could serve ads on “transmission repair costs” or whatever.
The second changes looks like product ads, which is an ecom ad format that you see on Google (top row of products), insta, Pinterest, etc… basically it’s exactly what it sounds like. Products in an ad, you can swipe through them.
If you don’t like targeted ads you’re not going to like these, if you didn’t care before you probably won’t care now.
But isn’t this basically like the old days of TV “targeting.” Before we had all data the content was proxy for audience. Day time soap operas were called soap operas because the content was the perfect proxy to reach stay at home wives and sell cleaning products to them. Similar, sports or certain types of comedy shows, etc skew towards a certain audience. So you use the content as proxy for the audience to run your ads against. This contextual targeting seems like that, but a bit more algorithmic in how it detects what the relevant content is based on key words in the text.
Feel like the previous subreddit targeting was basically like tv (or at least buying spots on a channel) and the new way is like Google search or (allegedly old) gmail ad targeting
Yeah. That’s probably a bit more accurate. But I think the main difference is context or contextual targeting can be done without knowing any data about the user, browsing history, etc. I think that has to be the compromise for ad targeting if we want to push for more user privacy and less tracking.
They’re already targeting customers for years the way you’re saying, we all know what they’re saying here.
Yeah this is literally a general roll out announcement. It wasn’t available to everyone before. Generally most ad platforms test features with enterprise level clients before letting everyone have access.