6 ms·

The last point always confuses me. Twitter can show ads to me without me having an account. Instead, they block me from reading on Twitter after a few tweets, t

The last point always confuses me. Twitter can show ads to me without me having an account. Instead, they block me from reading on Twitter after a few tweets, thus loosing my eyeballs. Maybe that's compensated by signups, but it certainly didn't work for me.

acedTrex 4y ago
Twitter makes more money showing TARGETED ads, ads that dont have a demo targeting are not nearly as valuable
- klyrs 4y ago
  Old school webmasters (perhaps this is redundant phrasing) know that's okay. Back in the day, you'd say "I'll put your animated gif on my site for $500 per month" and if you had a networking forum Cisco or whoever would happily pay that secure in the knowledge that your viewers were in the market for their product. Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    This seems like so obvious an observation that I don’t get why advertisers haven’t made it. If I’m in work-mode, and you show me an ad related to a hobby of mine, I have a 0% chance of clicking it. If you show me an ad related to my work, it is probably more like .01%. Which is still an infinite-times improvement.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      It's because there's an arms race to maximally exploit the massive amount of data they're collecting about individuals. The more specificity you can claim, the more the ad-buyers will pay. I'm not convinced it's doing any good, but I think a draw-down would be a hard sell for all parties involved in that market.
  - aparks517 4y ago
    Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.
  - jrs235 4y ago
    Re-targeting ads seem like a joke. Many times I've already bought their product or competitor's and am no longer interested. Hopefully they are paying for click throughs and not impressions.
wincy 4y ago
Good news, one of Elon’s top priorities is to remove this nagging stuff and make Twitter fully usable via browser again.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Believe it when you see it, not when you hear it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down. Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?
        anigbrowl 4y ago
        Could be desktop. Mobile browsing still seems to trigger demands for the app to be installed followed by login requests, though I just picked a few tweets at random rather than checking systematically.
      - Arrath 4y ago
        That specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.

acedTrex 4y ago

Twitter makes more money showing TARGETED ads, ads that dont have a demo targeting are not nearly as valuable

klyrs 4y ago
Old school webmasters (perhaps this is redundant phrasing) know that's okay. Back in the day, you'd say "I'll put your animated gif on my site for $500 per month" and if you had a networking forum Cisco or whoever would happily pay that secure in the knowledge that your viewers were in the market for their product. Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  This seems like so obvious an observation that I don’t get why advertisers haven’t made it. If I’m in work-mode, and you show me an ad related to a hobby of mine, I have a 0% chance of clicking it. If you show me an ad related to my work, it is probably more like .01%. Which is still an infinite-times improvement.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    It's because there's an arms race to maximally exploit the massive amount of data they're collecting about individuals. The more specificity you can claim, the more the ad-buyers will pay. I'm not convinced it's doing any good, but I think a draw-down would be a hard sell for all parties involved in that market.
- aparks517 4y ago
  Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.
- jrs235 4y ago
  Re-targeting ads seem like a joke. Many times I've already bought their product or competitor's and am no longer interested. Hopefully they are paying for click throughs and not impressions.

wincy 4y ago

Good news, one of Elon’s top priorities is to remove this nagging stuff and make Twitter fully usable via browser again.

anigbrowl 4y ago
Believe it when you see it, not when you hear it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down. Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        Could be desktop. Mobile browsing still seems to trigger demands for the app to be installed followed by login requests, though I just picked a few tweets at random rather than checking systematically.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      That specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.