Item — HN Reader

> This article, as usual, has no idea what it's talking about.

Are you talking about the article or the paper? The paper is published at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) with the conference char being people like Bruce Schneier. Besides, the author is Alessandro Acquisti and the details of their experiments are well outlined in the paper.

I understand that you see challenges, issues with their methods but you need to perform your own experiments and make a sound argument to make any strong statement. I'd be very cautious before I make a casual remark at a well conducted study. The study may have limitations but this doesn't mean the conclusions of the study are invalid.

2 comments

There is immense variation in programmatic ad pricing by publisher. Drawing conclusions about the market as a whole, or about publishers not exactly like the one studied, would be a mistake.

The article is what I said, but the paper isn't great either. Are those names supposed to mean something? The chair of the conference that the study is presented at is absolutely irrelevant, and I don't need to conduct my own experiments to discuss flaws in the process.

This wasn't a scientific study, nor is it well-conducted, because they looked at a single publisher over the course of a week in 2016 and are drawing conclusions for the entire market when they don't understand how big the market is and how the programmatic supply chain works. People in adtech deal with petabytes of data everyday. The fact that publishers don't see much revenue lift from behavioral targeting isn't a surprise, the whole industry knows it. So the study isn't completely wrong, but just looking at small picture that ends up aligning with the larger truth.

Why the rev is low isn't covered by the study, but the article tries to come up with an explanation. This is incorrect, which is what I cover in my first comment.