Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
And how you're tracked online. I've worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don't see you,the user, and your data.
I just click "female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone" and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they're super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that's advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won't even get into the audience side of things and they'll stick to keywords: they'll show you an ad because you searched for "autumn home decor" and that's all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don't have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don't understand it, and it's true, they don't have time... so then Google takes your "autumn wreath" keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for "Christmas trees", because they're both seasons and they're both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn't interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn't fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren't there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It's fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it's bad for everyone except Google.
It's very frustrating watching it happen as someone who is old enough to remember when it wasn't always this way. It used to be common business knowledge that if you help your customers, then your business will grow, and you'll be successful. But now these companies are so enormous, with such little competition, that their philosophy is "squeeze everyone until they're dead and then squeeze the new people who are forced to walk into your lair". It's not just the enshitification of the Internet, or the consumer market. These are companies that provide products and services so intertwined with our lives that it has become enshitification of the world, our very lives.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
Google used to have really robust tools for keyword research. They were even useful for finding overlooked niche subjects that paid well as an AdSense publisher. But as far as I can tell, they've completely removed those tools, instead pushing ignorance and "trust us" messages.
They still have a relatively good keyword research tool within the Google Ads interface, but I think I recall the stats are nuked unless you're actively paying money for an ads account.
The ad categories offered by various companies vary and I think adsense is nowhere near the closest-targetable network there is.
Try showing an ad to only Python software developers. Not IT repair shops. Not software developers writing exclusively C. I think you may be able to do that with keyword targeting on AdWords, once you avoid the bear traps you mentioned, but it's hard.
OTOH, I bet there are ad companies that will help you target "30-40 years, single, lonely" for dating ads (that might be possible even with adsense), and definitely people with specific diseases to peddle medicine to them.
Occasionally someone posts a list of categories used by one or multiple networks and they can be the most specific, or far too broad (see: python dev).
I'm extremely surprised that I haven't seen ad companies offering specifically to advertise to people working at specific companies. I'm sure it exists, just haven't seen it. This would be incredibly valuable both for job ads, industry specific ads (this would benefit from breaking down by department), and also criminals and spies trying to get people from specific companies infected with malware.
What's also important to understand is that these categories don't need to be accurate. "This person has a 80% chance to be in category X" is more than good enough. Hell, 10% would probably already work.
The right ads pay really well. A life insurance click can be worth tens of dollars, because the conversion is worth thousands. So if there is a 10% chance you're interested in buying life insurance, bombarding you with those ads makes sense.
Absolutely, I always thought Google ads categories were a little creepy... until I saw the Facebook categories, they're a lot more invasive and detailed.!
Yeah for Python devs it'll be targeting keywords, with bonus points for certain demographics. I don't think we get categories that detailed. I'll have a look when I'm in the office tomorrow 😅
It's very rare that I would target anything other than keywords, as it's pointless being so broad that you show to someone who's uninterested, it wastes everyone's time and money.
For me, the categories are just there to A) watch, and see if there are any interesting correlations (weirdly the people who most click the autumnal home decor are also into extreme sports?!) And to B) say you'll pay a percentage extra for people with relevant interests ( like, apparently extreme sports)
I'm managing a Google ad campaign for a non profit with a budget of a few hundred dollars a month. I came up with some keywords but have been using their automated stuff too. If you could suggest one thing I can do to improve what would it be?
Has the nonprofit applied for the Google Ad grant? Worth looking into it, if not.
Definitely this, but it does limit your targeting options. But it's not so bad if your sole goal is brand awareness, as it's all paid for you.
Google also has the world convinced that because they collect mountains of data on everyone, that their ad targeting is superhuman. They want people to believe that they know people so well that they can show someone an ad for something they want before they even know they want it.
Meanwhile, I lived in a country where I didn't speak one of the local languages, and every Google ad I saw was in that local language. The ads were 100% wasted because I had no idea what they were even advertising. This is despite my constant visiting English-only webpages, despite my browser settings saying which languages I spoke, and so-on.
If Google can't even be bothered to track what language to use for the ad, their ad tech is clearly worse than slapping a generic ad next to a newspaper article then printing up a million newspapers.
::hugs my PiHole::
It's a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.
I recommend:
LibreWolf + uBlock Origin for Desktop PCs and
Mull + uBlock Origin for Android.
Both web browsers are security hardened versions of Firefox.
I'd be interested in the amount of electricity that gets wasted on this
My guess is that it's a couple watts while you're actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they're on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.
That's another interesting thing btw. Most of the "internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity" are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at "how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including 'having an Internet connection' cause" but not if you're trying to look at "how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I'm not gonna live in a cave").
Don't the fans use a lot of power? And wouldn't a datacentre or server need a lot of cooling?
The server uses a kilowatt of power or more (most of it in the CPU). But if the server is serving 1000 active users concurrently, and only 5% of the time you spend online is spent fetching ads, 20000 people staring at their screens get their ads from let's say 2 kW of server power usage, plus another 2 kW for all the equipment to get the data there... for a total of 0.4 watts per user.
These are completely eyeballed numbers, and could easily be off by an order of magnitude.
But your on premise gear (screen, computer, router) are likely by far the biggest factor.
One easy way to cross-check power usage claims is cost. It will only catch the most egregious bullshit, but it's easy. A random page I found claims that "According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy it takes 5.12 kWh of electricity per gigabyte of transferred data."
A Steam game with 50 GB would thus consume 256 kWh. Even if your 300 watt idle gaming rig, 50 Watt Router and 150 watt screen to watch the progress bar spends 2 hours downloading that, that's 1 kWh. Even at 8 cents per kWh, that means just downloading the game would cost someone (not you) over $20. Do you think steam would let you delete and redownload that game that you bought on sale for $10 as much as you want if between them and your ISP someone had to pay for $20 just in electricity, each time? Not the game rights, not the servers, not the connection, just power.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense.
Keep in mind, one of the reasons we use data centers because cooling one big room of computers is cheaper than cooling 200 small rooms with computers.
I'd be interested in finding out why some of the ads I see (mostly in Android games I play where I voluntarily watch the ads for in game rewards) are so badly matched to me. I'll get ads in Spanish when I only speak English. I'll get ads for dating sites when I've been married for over 20 years.
Very few of the ads seem to be anything I'd even remotely consider. Not that I mind too much. I ignore the ads (sometimes even muting them) and do other things until they stop playing and I can get my rewards. Still, those very mismatched ads seem to be badly placed. Is it just that nobody else is bidding for this ad spot so "let's play this Spanish ad for toilet paper" wins the rights to advertise to me?
That's one possibility. It's also possible that you have decent privacy settings keeping them from knowing too much about you, or they simply use a shitty ad network that's bad at targeting. Even the major ones are impressively bad.
There also aren't many advertisers interested in these ad slots since they know people watch them only for the reward, and games are also a frequent source of ad fraud (I think), so serious advertisers avoid them.
Also, mobile gamers are likely not the most attractive audience for the high paying stuff.
It's usually terrible advertisers. They've got their account set to show to everyone in a super broad range. Like "uses a phone, under 50, in country X" and that's all they're going by.
This is combined with Google's shitty "we'll tell you how much to spend and who to spend it on, trust us!" Automation and dark patterns, which just spaffs all your money in places you don't want to. Such as mobile apps! Which used to be one click to disable but now its 200+! Or location, which now defaults to "people who have shown interest in your country" when it used to just show ads to people in the country. Or keyword matching which used to be a lot more strict, but now they keep broadening things. (One headphone company we worked with spent thousands on "telephone" keywords, that they never entered into their account)
I am a fairly liberal militant atheist and nearly all my political ads are for hard right stuff. I have concerns about the future when people start wondering what exactly they are paying for in terms of ads vs sales. Trying to sell me on Epoch Times or Prague-U is like trying to selling red meat to vegans.
I heard that (at least on YouTube) it isn't only how high people bid but how likely someone is to click on your ad. Like if you have an ad they're likely to click on you may get shown even if you bid less. You probably know more about it, I'm just sharing this because it sounded fascinating when I heard about it.
Those are different models. Ads can be sold pay per view, pay per click, or even pay per conversion (the store reports when the customer buys something and only pays for that).
These can be converted by multiplying with the estimated probabilities. For example, if the scammer is willing to pay $1 for the click, and the probability that the user will click is estimated to be one-in-500, the view would be worth 0.2 cents.
If the scammer is willing to pay $20 for the conversion (because it means they successfully scammed someone out of $30), they'd need to succeed scamming one in 20 users that clicked for this to work out.
Works the same for legit businesses of course, where the business will consider total lifetime value (not just the current sale - you might also subscribe to something and keep paying for 2 years, or come back to buy again). Advertising / customer acquisition costs are a huge part of many businesses, which is why running online ad platforms is so obscenely profitable.
In this case, I don't know who in the chain will do the conversion - if the bid will be for a click and the ad platform will estimate how likely you are to click, or if the bidder makes the guess and bids based on that. The bidder in this case would be another ad platform of course, acting on behalf of the actual advertiser, and nobody in this "ecosystem" trusts each other. It's full of companies trying to scam each other or companies offering services to validate that the data someone is feeding you is real.
How online ads actually work.
Very simplified TLDR: you visit a news site. They load an ad network and tell it "put ads here, here and here".
The ad network now tells 300 companies (seriously, look at the details of some cookie consent dialogs) that you visited that news site so they can bid for the right to shove an ad in your face.
One of them goes "I know this guy, they're an easy mark for scams according to my tracking, I'll pay you 0.3 cents to shove this ad in their face". Someone else yells "I know this guy, he looked at toasters last week, I want to pay 0.2 cents to show him toaster ads just in case he hasn't bought one yet."
The others bid less, so that scam ad gets shoved in your face.
That's extremely simplified of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding has a bit more of an explanation.
And how you're tracked online. I've worked on Google ads accounts every day for a decade and I don't see you,the user, and your data.
I just click "female, 50+, likes home decor, uses a phone" and then a little business I work with bids 10% extra on you because they think you might be interested in their new autumn wreaths they're super proud of, and Google think you fit that box I ticked.
And that's advanced marketing for most businesses. Most businesses won't even get into the audience side of things and they'll stick to keywords: they'll show you an ad because you searched for "autumn home decor" and that's all.
Google take advantage of most advertisers by saying "let us be in charge of your keywords, and how much money you spend, our AI is smarter than you and you don't have time!"And most businesses just use the automatic stuff because they don't understand it, and it's true, they don't have time... so then Google takes your "autumn wreath" keyword and shows your ads to someone looking for "Christmas trees", because they're both seasons and they're both plant related, right?
And then the small business gets charged $1 by Google to show their autumnal page to someone who wasn't interested and left right away.
My job is to help these businesses actually make an advertising account that doesn't fall for all these little bear traps that Google sets all over their ads interface. They weren't there 7 years ago, but things have been getting worse and worse. Including third party sales companies like regalix, hired by Google to constantly call you and telling you to trust the automation and spend more.
It's fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it's bad for everyone except Google.
It's very frustrating watching it happen as someone who is old enough to remember when it wasn't always this way. It used to be common business knowledge that if you help your customers, then your business will grow, and you'll be successful. But now these companies are so enormous, with such little competition, that their philosophy is "squeeze everyone until they're dead and then squeeze the new people who are forced to walk into your lair". It's not just the enshitification of the Internet, or the consumer market. These are companies that provide products and services so intertwined with our lives that it has become enshitification of the world, our very lives.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Google used to have really robust tools for keyword research. They were even useful for finding overlooked niche subjects that paid well as an AdSense publisher. But as far as I can tell, they've completely removed those tools, instead pushing ignorance and "trust us" messages.
They still have a relatively good keyword research tool within the Google Ads interface, but I think I recall the stats are nuked unless you're actively paying money for an ads account.
The ad categories offered by various companies vary and I think adsense is nowhere near the closest-targetable network there is.
Try showing an ad to only Python software developers. Not IT repair shops. Not software developers writing exclusively C. I think you may be able to do that with keyword targeting on AdWords, once you avoid the bear traps you mentioned, but it's hard.
OTOH, I bet there are ad companies that will help you target "30-40 years, single, lonely" for dating ads (that might be possible even with adsense), and definitely people with specific diseases to peddle medicine to them.
Occasionally someone posts a list of categories used by one or multiple networks and they can be the most specific, or far too broad (see: python dev).
I'm extremely surprised that I haven't seen ad companies offering specifically to advertise to people working at specific companies. I'm sure it exists, just haven't seen it. This would be incredibly valuable both for job ads, industry specific ads (this would benefit from breaking down by department), and also criminals and spies trying to get people from specific companies infected with malware.
What's also important to understand is that these categories don't need to be accurate. "This person has a 80% chance to be in category X" is more than good enough. Hell, 10% would probably already work.
The right ads pay really well. A life insurance click can be worth tens of dollars, because the conversion is worth thousands. So if there is a 10% chance you're interested in buying life insurance, bombarding you with those ads makes sense.
Absolutely, I always thought Google ads categories were a little creepy... until I saw the Facebook categories, they're a lot more invasive and detailed.!
Yeah for Python devs it'll be targeting keywords, with bonus points for certain demographics. I don't think we get categories that detailed. I'll have a look when I'm in the office tomorrow 😅
It's very rare that I would target anything other than keywords, as it's pointless being so broad that you show to someone who's uninterested, it wastes everyone's time and money.
For me, the categories are just there to A) watch, and see if there are any interesting correlations (weirdly the people who most click the autumnal home decor are also into extreme sports?!) And to B) say you'll pay a percentage extra for people with relevant interests ( like, apparently extreme sports)
I'm managing a Google ad campaign for a non profit with a budget of a few hundred dollars a month. I came up with some keywords but have been using their automated stuff too. If you could suggest one thing I can do to improve what would it be?
Has the nonprofit applied for the Google Ad grant? Worth looking into it, if not.
Definitely this, but it does limit your targeting options. But it's not so bad if your sole goal is brand awareness, as it's all paid for you.
Google also has the world convinced that because they collect mountains of data on everyone, that their ad targeting is superhuman. They want people to believe that they know people so well that they can show someone an ad for something they want before they even know they want it.
Meanwhile, I lived in a country where I didn't speak one of the local languages, and every Google ad I saw was in that local language. The ads were 100% wasted because I had no idea what they were even advertising. This is despite my constant visiting English-only webpages, despite my browser settings saying which languages I spoke, and so-on.
If Google can't even be bothered to track what language to use for the ad, their ad tech is clearly worse than slapping a generic ad next to a newspaper article then printing up a million newspapers.
::hugs my PiHole::
It's a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.
I recommend: LibreWolf + uBlock Origin for Desktop PCs and Mull + uBlock Origin for Android. Both web browsers are security hardened versions of Firefox.
I'd be interested in the amount of electricity that gets wasted on this
My guess is that it's a couple watts while you're actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they're on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.
That's another interesting thing btw. Most of the "internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity" are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at "how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including 'having an Internet connection' cause" but not if you're trying to look at "how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I'm not gonna live in a cave").
Don't the fans use a lot of power? And wouldn't a datacentre or server need a lot of cooling?
The server uses a kilowatt of power or more (most of it in the CPU). But if the server is serving 1000 active users concurrently, and only 5% of the time you spend online is spent fetching ads, 20000 people staring at their screens get their ads from let's say 2 kW of server power usage, plus another 2 kW for all the equipment to get the data there... for a total of 0.4 watts per user.
These are completely eyeballed numbers, and could easily be off by an order of magnitude.
But your on premise gear (screen, computer, router) are likely by far the biggest factor.
One easy way to cross-check power usage claims is cost. It will only catch the most egregious bullshit, but it's easy. A random page I found claims that "According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy it takes 5.12 kWh of electricity per gigabyte of transferred data."
A Steam game with 50 GB would thus consume 256 kWh. Even if your 300 watt idle gaming rig, 50 Watt Router and 150 watt screen to watch the progress bar spends 2 hours downloading that, that's 1 kWh. Even at 8 cents per kWh, that means just downloading the game would cost someone (not you) over $20. Do you think steam would let you delete and redownload that game that you bought on sale for $10 as much as you want if between them and your ISP someone had to pay for $20 just in electricity, each time? Not the game rights, not the servers, not the connection, just power.
Thanks, this makes a lot of sense.
Keep in mind, one of the reasons we use data centers because cooling one big room of computers is cheaper than cooling 200 small rooms with computers.
I'd be interested in finding out why some of the ads I see (mostly in Android games I play where I voluntarily watch the ads for in game rewards) are so badly matched to me. I'll get ads in Spanish when I only speak English. I'll get ads for dating sites when I've been married for over 20 years.
Very few of the ads seem to be anything I'd even remotely consider. Not that I mind too much. I ignore the ads (sometimes even muting them) and do other things until they stop playing and I can get my rewards. Still, those very mismatched ads seem to be badly placed. Is it just that nobody else is bidding for this ad spot so "let's play this Spanish ad for toilet paper" wins the rights to advertise to me?
That's one possibility. It's also possible that you have decent privacy settings keeping them from knowing too much about you, or they simply use a shitty ad network that's bad at targeting. Even the major ones are impressively bad.
There also aren't many advertisers interested in these ad slots since they know people watch them only for the reward, and games are also a frequent source of ad fraud (I think), so serious advertisers avoid them.
Also, mobile gamers are likely not the most attractive audience for the high paying stuff.
It's usually terrible advertisers. They've got their account set to show to everyone in a super broad range. Like "uses a phone, under 50, in country X" and that's all they're going by.
This is combined with Google's shitty "we'll tell you how much to spend and who to spend it on, trust us!" Automation and dark patterns, which just spaffs all your money in places you don't want to. Such as mobile apps! Which used to be one click to disable but now its 200+! Or location, which now defaults to "people who have shown interest in your country" when it used to just show ads to people in the country. Or keyword matching which used to be a lot more strict, but now they keep broadening things. (One headphone company we worked with spent thousands on "telephone" keywords, that they never entered into their account)
I am a fairly liberal militant atheist and nearly all my political ads are for hard right stuff. I have concerns about the future when people start wondering what exactly they are paying for in terms of ads vs sales. Trying to sell me on Epoch Times or Prague-U is like trying to selling red meat to vegans.
I heard that (at least on YouTube) it isn't only how high people bid but how likely someone is to click on your ad. Like if you have an ad they're likely to click on you may get shown even if you bid less. You probably know more about it, I'm just sharing this because it sounded fascinating when I heard about it.
Those are different models. Ads can be sold pay per view, pay per click, or even pay per conversion (the store reports when the customer buys something and only pays for that).
These can be converted by multiplying with the estimated probabilities. For example, if the scammer is willing to pay $1 for the click, and the probability that the user will click is estimated to be one-in-500, the view would be worth 0.2 cents.
If the scammer is willing to pay $20 for the conversion (because it means they successfully scammed someone out of $30), they'd need to succeed scamming one in 20 users that clicked for this to work out.
Works the same for legit businesses of course, where the business will consider total lifetime value (not just the current sale - you might also subscribe to something and keep paying for 2 years, or come back to buy again). Advertising / customer acquisition costs are a huge part of many businesses, which is why running online ad platforms is so obscenely profitable.
In this case, I don't know who in the chain will do the conversion - if the bid will be for a click and the ad platform will estimate how likely you are to click, or if the bidder makes the guess and bids based on that. The bidder in this case would be another ad platform of course, acting on behalf of the actual advertiser, and nobody in this "ecosystem" trusts each other. It's full of companies trying to scam each other or companies offering services to validate that the data someone is feeding you is real.