Sources Say Amazon Will Soon Be Targeting Ads, a la Google AdWords 83
According to The Register (citing a paywalled WSJ article), a new face in targeted ads is emerging (according to "people familiar with the matter") to compete with Google, and it's Amazon. They already have a vast, mineable collection of data about customers' buying, listening and viewing habits, so exploiting personalized ads seems a natural follow-on. According to the report, the ad system would replace Google as ad vendor on Amazon itself, and "It is also apparently hoping to beef up its ad placement business on other sites as part of Amazon's strategy to carve its way into Google's multi-billion-dollar AdWords' empire." Pretty soon Amazon will able to just save me time by ordering the things I would have ordered based on ads that they themselves have placed.
easy solution.... (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, fine, do it already. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm OK with targeted ads. I just wish they would figure out how to target them.
I bought a couple of 'Hello Kitty' flash drives close to a year ago. It was a joke, people kept stealing my generic looking ones. The Hello Kitty sticks stay in my desk. Since then, every other time I log in, Amazon has to breathlessly show me various Hello Kitty things. An impressive panoply of products, but ones that I'm not especially interested in.
Try to buy something for a gift? Well, idiot algorithm thinks you're going to buy the same thing for the next six months....
You'd think it this was easy.
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Some of the comments have been about how the BCS (the algo) didn't factor in if the field was muddy, if a player was injured (some do), experience and maturity of players, and could not determine when margin of victory mattered. Humans, however, have no issue being able to dynamically add a factor to the algorithm. Humans can easily tweak how much we
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Try to buy something for a gift? Well, idiot algorithm thinks you're going to buy the same thing for the next six months....
IIRC, Netflix recently added an option for you to watch movies without them being added to the Netflix recommendation algorithm.
You'd think companies like Facebook and Amazon would be so smart as to offer you an option to remove items from their profile of you.
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Amazon do, there is an area for you to improve your recommendations, where you can simply tick items not to be used for recommendations.
Don't think I've bothered really though, it should be more seamless than me having to go and hunt it out etc. simply easier for me to ignore the recommendations.
Re: OK, fine, do it already. (Score:1)
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Re:OK, fine, do it already. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm OK with targeted ads. I just wish they would figure out how to target them.
On the desktop version of Amazon [amazon.com], go to "Your Account" on the top right next to the search bar, then "Your Recommendations" from the drop down. Under the search bar there should be a "Improve Your Recommendations" link. Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."
Note: If anyone cares, I do not work for Amazon any more than any of their other customers do.
Re:OK, fine, do it already. (Score:5, Insightful)
Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."
Mod parent up! GP is complaining about a problem that actually has a known solution, which Amazon has been reasonable enough to implement.
GP is complaining about the precise behavior that allowed him to accomplish his goal in ordering the flash drive. Amazon obviously profiled people and predicts that the demographic who will buy "Hello Kitty" products is very specific, and most people do NOT want that stuff.
GP's argument is thus actually proof that Amazon's algorithm is probably working well. GP chose a product that would be undesirable for most of his coworkers for the very reason that it's something of a niche product. By buying such a product, GP identified himself to the algorithm as one of those few people (unlike his coworkers) who would want such a product.
Now he expects Amazon to just intuit that he's some sort of exception to that general rule (which in this case, is probably a very good rule, or someone would have stolen GP's flash drives by now).
I'm not saying Amazon's recommendations couldn't be improved -- but this particular example is very poor. And if GP wants to fix his recommendations, Amazon has a system specifically designed to allow this.
Re:OK, fine, do it already. (Score:4, Insightful)
The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
GP wasn't complaining about advertising. He was talking about recommendations -- and he obviously wants to have better recommendations or he wouldn't bother looking at them at all. So, if he's looking at recommendations, chances are he would like to improve them -- and if that requires just a few clicks, it might actually be worth it to him.
I, personally, haven't looked at Amazon's recommendations in years. I don't care what they say or how accurate they are. If they were listing a bunch of Hello Kitty products, I wouldn't go around complaining about it, because I never even notice the recommendations. GP obvious does, which implies he pays some attention to them. If he wants to improve them, Amazon has a mechanism for doing so.
As to your assertion that regular people wouldn't help advertising companies, I'm not so sure about that. Slashdot is full of a bunch of people who never want to see ads. (I'm one of them.) I'm never going to even look at an ad, so the only thing I ever want to see on an ad is the quickest way to close it.
But, believe it or not, there are people in the world who look at ads. And some companies have been moving to a model that forces people to watch ads. In those cases, assuming I'd actually use the service at all (which I probably wouldn't, but others might), I'd appreciate a little box that says, "I don't want to see ads like this one again." If I'm being forced to look at an ad anyway, I might as well take that time to click something that will make that ad go away and put something better next time.
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Now you are really off in lala land. The recommendations are on the same page as the products he's looking at. Noting them is not the same as seeking them out.
What version of Amazon's page do you visit? If I go to an Amazon product page, I see links to "Items Frequently Bought Together," "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." and "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed..." and things like that. Perhaps those are personalized to some extent, but those products are mostly based on what product page you're actually on and on what others have bought -- not on whether you bought a random unrelated "Hello Kitty" product.
To get to see personalized recom
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The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.
Somehow the geekboy bias of slashdot thinks it's a great idea to make the effort to do Amazon's or Google's job of making targeted ads non-annoying. For normal people, configuring ads on Amazon's behalf is obviously annoying and is obviously a non-starter.
Of course, the real solution is not to do Amazon's job for them. The real solution is to block ads. No, the websites won't go away. Corporations are hooked on money and will find another way to stay in business.
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Can we tell Amazon never to recommend for ALL by default?
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I bought a couple of 'Hello Kitty' flash drives close to a year ago. It was a joke, people kept stealing my generic looking ones. The Hello Kitty sticks stay in my desk. Since then, every other time I log in, Amazon has to breathlessly show me various Hello Kitty things. An impressive panoply of products, but ones that I'm not especially interested in.
If that bothers you, then definitely avoid clicking any links on The Worst Things for Sale [theworstth...orsale.com]. The recommendation algorithm doesn't automatically discriminate between things you might want to buy vs. things you looked at for shock or humor value. Thanks, Amazon, but I don't need a 55 gallon drum of personal lubricant at the moment.
Shocking! (Score:2)
Amazon wants to show specific products to people that might be interested in them? Shocking!
Also, Adblock Plus, and maybe shop at other businesses that don't have the objectionable practices as Amazon and Wal-Mart?
Fuck you APK (Score:1)
I see 2 problems (Score:2)
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So you are saying that you have an interest in buying things for others, that you yourself would not want. So what. The point is: here is the type of stuff this guy might buy , not here is the stuff this guy might want."
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A good system will see it was bought only once, and mark it as an abberation.
That's not the behavior I would want. When I first get interested in something new, I'll often buy one or two related items to "try things out." If I've gotten to the stage that I'm actually buying anything, chances are that I'm probably going to become interested in seeing more (at least considering it -- whether or not I will follow up and continue buying things depends on a lot of factors).
So, no, I don't want that behavior in a "good system." I'd frankly prefer a system that defaults to showing me
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Again. They aren't false positives. You buy stuff like that. The system doesn't care who you buy it for, or why you buy it. If you bought it for others before, you're likely to do it again, and while you may have never wanted it in the first place, you clearly wanted to buy it, or you wouldn't have purchased it.
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Except for the case where I bought something from a wishlist and had it shipped to the person who put it on the wishlist. Then
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Half the time is occaisonally. Got it.
Maybe you didn't know that you don't actually have to buy the items? What are the chances that you will buy a Lexus or a tampon? You don't seem to understand how targeted ads work at all. They don't guarantee that you'll only see ads for things you want to buy, any m
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Half the time is occaisonally. Got it.
Are you really that dense? You may be buying gifts for one of your friends half of the time, but you're not buying gifts for one specific friend half of the time. Recommending things that one friend likes when you're shopping for things for a different friend may coincidentally be useful, but probably isn't unless you have a very homogeneous set of friends.
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Amazon will be updating their TOS to include the prohibition of buying things from them that you don't, personally, want.
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So how about you get off your ass and change the laws governing how ridiculous your taxes are?
No, you don't ACTUALLY want that do you? My guess is that you're happy to take all the benefits those taxes provide, but somehow think its okay to not actually participate in paying them.
Do you abstain from using public roads? Public transit? Public policing? How about water and power which are subsidized by taxes? Do you enjoy the protection of California's tough environmental laws or do you not?
You're just a
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California has one of the highest tax burdens in the country [taxfoundation.org]. It's even worse if you factor in average income. Graduated income taxes means states with higher incomes naturally have a higher tax burden. The #1-3 tax burden st
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First, about half of what I buy on Amazon are gifts that I myself would not have any interest in owning.
IIRC, you can mark an item as a gift when you purchase it (not sure if that impacts recommendations). You can alter the recommendations via "Your Account", "Your Recommendations", "Improve Recommendations", "Don't use for recommendations."
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Re: Jeff, the trip you've been waiting for is ON S (Score:1)
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I care about the covert surveillance which enables targeted ads.
I care about powerful corporate and political interests attempting to manipulate my decisions. That's nothing less than mind control, black magic [youtube.com].
The ads themselves? Adblock Plus removes them from my sight anyway.
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Amazon? Really? (Score:2)
From a business aspect, I'm shocked that they're not doing it already. They have more information about their customers than probably any single organization on the planet. Considering how badly they're bleeding cash, I'm wondering why they haven't been doing this all along.
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They didn't target their customers? (Score:2)
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It could make buying easier.
Its more likely that you'll just end up not being exposed to new items that may be useful to you.
Profiled advertising seems like a great idea, except (as it stands currently) you end up advertising to people who are already buying your products, and hence, theres not really any point in them getting your advertisements.
Compete with Google? (Score:5, Informative)
Google tracks a large portion of the websites you visit, including slashdot. They have a more detailed browsing history. If you use gmail, they probably have all your purchasing history as well (including Amazon). Not to mention your search history. So, Amazon has a fraction of the data that Google would have on a person.
The only thing that Amazon has over Google is that you use Amazon ads and if a visitor buys something, you get a nice 4% commission. But, I don't know if big money will come from that - it's just blogs.
Buy before you order (Score:2)
Pretty soon Amazon will able to just save me time by ordering the things I would have ordered based on ads that they themselves have placed.
Submitter might have thought that was a joke, but Amazon already has applied for a patent on that [wsj.com].
Doing it now (Score:2)
I'm already getting profiled ads based on my Amazon shopping.
Annoying as fuck. Looking for more ad blocking extensions.
They already do (Score:2)
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Like Being A Target (Score:2)
I have a rule and so do most people (Score:1)
To NEVER EVER EVER EVER consider any product or service that advertises. For example, Pandora runs the same local car dealer ad for every other ad, every day. Not only am I not buying a car, I will never use that dealer. Ever. Never Ever. Ever.