[ExI] privacy

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 6:29 AM, Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 11:44 AM, William Flynn Wallace
> <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Maybe there could be some national web site where I could go and tell
>> advertisers what I do and do not want.  I am never going to buy a new car -
>> ever.  So don't waste your ads on me.  It does cost them, right? Sending ads
>> to people who won't use them drives up the prices of goods and services.
>
> Advertisers could easily set up such a web site. They probably don't think
> it would be beneficial to them.

Much of marketing is creating demand where none previously existed.
You might not think you want to buy a new car/a certain drug/et
cetera, but marketers see it as their job to convince you that you do
want to.  They only need to succeed in a relatively tiny number of
cases.

Unfortunately, this ignores the far larger number of cases where
you've heard their pitch (or a substantially similar competitor's),
decided "no", and new pitches that don't bring in a new argument - let
alone spammed repetitions of the same pitch - simply won't work.

In theory life circumstances may change, so what you weren't
interested in 5 years ago you might now be interested in, but in
practice - when advertisers even care - that argument gets pressed
into practically no time (if I wasn't interested in something a few
seconds ago, I almost certainly still won't be interested now when I
click onto a new page).

I recall that YouTube, some time ago, tried "is this advertisement
relevant to you? Y/N" clickables next to the ad.  I have not seen that
in many months.  I suspect they found an overwhelming number of Ns
that could not meaningfully be correlated to anything (and thus were
essentially useless in determining what advertising was considered
relevant - aside from the conclusion that "almost no advertising is
ever relevant", which they could not accept if they sought to display
ads they could claim seemed relevant), but it would be interesting to
see the data so as to confirm or refute that theory.