What is a well known 'public secret' in the industry you work in that the majority of outsiders are unaware of?

NotSpez@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 629 points –
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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.