ChatGPT ad targeting is garbage

At most, I would call advertisement a Tragedy of the Commons. But the way publicity works, it feels like the tragedy is unavoidable; all smart advertisers will eventually transgress against normalcy.

Here in Serbia, even in the worst of times (sanctions, NATO bombing in 1999), people with internet access could participate in local and global fora, newsgroups etc. It was expensive to get a computer and internet access, but people were willing to pay to host a small community. Late in 90s and early in 2000s, there was a huge number of cheap "virtual hosting" providers, and even cheaper LAMP stack providers, where people would run their own phpBB or similar forum software. IRC I probably need not mention.

This "great equalising" has been nothing but a negative in the long run.

It is not at all obvious that this would be a worse timeline to live in.

The content that ad-based websites brought was mostly clickbait designed around serving these ads.

Probably more that from an ROI perspective that’s probably the “least worst” vs the best.

And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?

My wife will get ads on Instagram targeting me though.

One day I looked at some retro console, she texted me asking if I was looking at a console, she got like 8 ads for it.

BTW That why money off vouchers are so common with ads. Because this is an actual way you can check if the ad is working. Although there are confounding factors - maybe they were going to buy from you before they saw the voucher?

I don't think any single form of advertising is effective on the whole population.

By their nature, they should be a positive.

However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.

Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.

So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.

This is not really true. Ads, especially the classifieds, were often the only way that newspapers and news organizations stayed afloat aside from public funding. What happened was the major ad-tech companies captured the revenue and the subscriber data that came from ads and viewers that would normally go to those organizations. "Real journalism" often didn't make much if not any money. "Real journalism" at least for most of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st has always existed alongside advertising. Magazines literally survived on advertising, their entire product to readers was long form content, while, to brands, a higher quality product and more targeted subscriber base. It's pure romanticism to say that ads themselves were the problem. Ad-tech, it's monopoly control in the hands of 2-3 behemoths, is the real issue.