We used to be a proper society, advertisers bought placements that were most directly valuable to us. Throughout history, advertisers selected publications based on the audience.
“I want to get in front of X, because I know they are more likely to buy than Y.”
As the world has moved online, this concept has become less and less possible to execute, creating rapidly worsening results. The algorithm decides who sees your content, not you. Apps want to monopolize the benefits of being a publisher and socialize the negatives.
The social apps have optimized toward time on site and engagement to maximize ad impressions. Theoretically, more impressions are what advertisers want and thus optimizing for engagement is good for all of us, right? The truth is that engagement is not necessarily enjoyed. Ragebait produces 10x more engagement than content that makes people buy things.
A lower conversion rate is fine as long as there are more conversions.
Theoretically, more impressions mean more conversions. …Except, we know for a fact, it does not work like that.
It will take a lot more impressions to convince a man buy a tampon than it would if you served that ad to a woman. Apps would preserve a lot of impressions for use by other advertisers if they let advertisers choose who they advertise to. It would expose users to less content that they don’t want to see and give advertisers the opportunity to optimize for content they do want to see.
This is also true for organic content.
Why are the users asked to trust the apps’ engineers to solve for their delight? We had a functioning system where users could select who they wanted to follow and explore via trending topics. Engineers solved a problem that I truly believe didn’t really exist with the invention of the algorithmic recommendation engine.
“I missed all my friends’ posts because I had a chronological feed”
You could’ve just gone to their profile to look, you didn’t care.
I imagine the problem was that they couldn’t figure out how to serve ads to people looking at profiles …but this has been solved twice over (influencer paid posts and profile ads).
Maybe the issue is that the apps need to invent use cases for their creepy user behavior tracking that has long outlived its usefulness. The data that informed the tracking network is gone, IDFA and device ids are gone, cookies still sorta work but they don’t really feed the whole network the same way. “I know what you want more than you do” was never a thing the apps could really do by themselves, they always used influential users’ signals to produce this magical effect. The apps have lost the signal, ironically drowning it out by incentivizing the creation of signals. The tech industry has focused on increasing metrics without understanding why they’re important or how they fit into the ecosystem.
Engagement culture, the attention economy, flattens the content produced, the audience served, and the value of advertising to said audience.
I am 100% sure that I would spend more on ads if they just let me consistently pick the audience want to I advertise to. The app engineers understand that they want a control group so they can test variables and get meaningful measurables, why don’t they understand that advertisers also want that, and that advertisers having access to that would improve the quality of ads produced?
People naturally want to measure and improve, users measure their engagement, advertisers measure their profits, but for whatever reason the apps have only allowed us nebulous concepts of measurement and that predictably produces worse results!
Give users and advertisers the ability to choose and respect our choices. Let users choose what content they want to see, let them choose who they follow. That doesn’t mean the recommendation engine has to die, in fact, it would likely dramatically improve the quality. The apps have to make room for their users to actually use them and not just be used by them.
