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porridgeraisintoday at 3:38 AM1 replyview on HN

If you go to the root cause, the reason they want to maximise user-minutes is because it is in turn proportional to ad minutes.

Banning targeted ads will greatly reduce the benefit of ads (to the social media company) since they are rendered less effective. This will tip the scales of the cost-benefit tradeoff that the company makes. In this case, the cost of the ad is that it's annoying to the user. Every ad company chooses a tradeoff. If you made the benefit smaller, then they would have to reduce the cost too, which would lead to lower ad volume, which would reduce the incentive for engagement.

Any other way to reduce the effectiveness of ads also works. I'm sure the method I suggested(banning targeting) is not bulletproof, but they key thing that needs to be done is artificially reducing the effectiveness/relevance/quality of ads.


Replies

rjmunrotoday at 12:30 PM

Surely if you ban targeting ads they'd have to catch up the revenue, and that would mean serving you more ads, worse ads and using stronger algorithms to ensure you stay longer. I don't think it makes any difference.