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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That was always part of the enshittification formula. The final stage after exploiting users is to exploit business customers to the breaking point.
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.
