7 ms·

The article makes a big assumption that ads cannot exist without privacy violations, but that's simply not true. Print ads have existed for longer than the inte

The article makes a big assumption that ads cannot exist without privacy violations, but that's simply not true. Print ads have existed for longer than the internet, and they're chosen based on the content, not the reader. If I'm reading an article about guitars, show me an ad for a guitar or pedal or amp. Easy. That would already be better than 99% of today's "targeted" ads.

tobr 4y ago
I wonder if you read the part about fraud detection?
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  That argument is somewhat flimsy though. It is only a problem if you want to pay per view. If you just pay for "show it for one week" as in print then there is no issue.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    But in print it is knowable how many copies are going out, isn't it?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Even that can be fiddled. USAToday used to do it via deals with hotels to put one outside your room. Boom, extra copies!
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        Printing a newspaper at least costs a bit more money and there's a decent chance someone will read the copy of the paper in their hotel room. Fake Web traffic could easily dwarf real traffic.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Yeah although ad buyers of any sophistication knew going in that a lot of certain newspapers were hotel copies (though arguably a lot of people read those), trade rags vs. consumer subscriptions, general vs. niche, etc. and took that into account. They still didn't have a great idea of how effective they were a lot of the time of course.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Advertisers would want to know something akin to circulation numbers before paying for placement though. And they would want to be reasonably confident those numbers aren't pumped by fraud. Maybe the web needs something like Nielsen ratings, where Verified real users voluntarily submit their browsing to help advertisers determine watch time.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      I talk about this at the end of the post as well. I think a ratings panel approach doesn't apply well to the web because the web is so fragmented. (In a good way! I like that there are lots of independent sites!) Unless you had something like 10% of real users or a super representative 1% I think you'd have a big problem with getting realistic numbers outside huge sites.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yes. But even if you pay for a month placement on a given site, the ad buyer is still going to want an estimate of how many legitimate viewers see/saw your ad. It probably works better on things like podcasts but the bottom line is that you can't really trust me to tell you how many viewers my site had without some fraud detection mechanisms in place. (And even then fraud is apparently pretty rampant.)
    - Saris 4y ago
      I may be missing something, but why? Wouldn't the buyer just look at how many people arrived at their website from the ad?
      - ghaff 4y ago
        How do you know those clicks are people? (You can measure just conversions but that's a much higher bar for measuring an ad and a direct conversion may not even be your objective.)
      - jefftk 4y ago
        Bots can click through like any other visitors. They won't buy stuff, though, so if you're placing ads for people to directly take an expensive action ("performance advertising") you're mostly ok. Brand advertising, though, is very dependent on fraud detection because it doesn't have this clear connection. There's more about this near the end of the post.
        tobr 4y ago
        Do you think it’s possible to measure how many people are coming from an ad on a specific site and buying something, without also resorting to illegal tracking?
        jefftk 4y ago
        That's a good point. I think a shopping site might be able to succeed in arguing that they had a legitimate interest in tracking how people arrived on their site, but possibly not. On the other hand, if half of your visitors consent to tracking that's enough to have a pretty good sense of the value you're getting from each source.
- orangeoxidation 4y ago
  Print can charge for ad placement, not impressions. But that's only possible because the number of subscribers, size and number of print runs, circulation are well known and hard to fake stats. The web cannot do that without tracking...
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    Big sites (newspapers) could do it the same way - maybe independent reach surveys could be the data that they use to back up their web ad pricing.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I think that's one of the points though. Big sites can back up their digital reach claims such as by using third parties. But if vetting yourself for advertisers was to become a requirement, advertisers just might not bother with small sites. Though admittedly Google makes money off small sites--but I bet most of those small sites don't make enough to make note of.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        Google's vetting of small sites is pretty minimal. Instead they use fraud detection: vetting the traffic itself.
        ghaff 4y ago
        Right. Which is the point both of us are making I think. If you can't do some minimum floor of fraud detection more or less transparently and cheaply, you fall back on more heavyweight mechanisms and probably screen out any site that isn't "big."
  - contravariant 4y ago
    Depends what you call tracking. Just like a newspaper company knows how many copies they distribute a website would know how many copies they've sent over the line. You might not trust them but I don't see why you'd think a newspaper would have a harder time claiming they've made more copies than they have.
emodendroket 4y ago
The argument is specific to electronic ads.
- lucideer 4y ago
  It isn't. What the ad industry refers to as "fraud detection" is just abuse of a monitoring system they didn't have access to in print (pay per view/click) - print ads were still deemed effective even without assurance of per-individual revenue. There's no reason electronic ads couldn't've been treated the same - the only difference is advertisers have been allowed to develop surveillance to gain granular revenue insights (and anything abusing that system of surveillance is labelled "fraud") Ad fraud is only legitimately "fraud" if you accept the pervasive surveillance it's "defrauding" is legitimate to begin with.
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    I don't see how you figure. If I pay to put an ad in the New York Times, the circulation is not a secret. If I pay to put an ad in some Web site (or, worse, thousands of Web sites I don't know about in advance) then I have no insight whatsoever into how many impressions I'm getting if we decide it's illegitimate to try and measure traffic.
    - lucideer 4y ago
      You can measure traffic anonymously or pseudonymously without violating GDPR. Monitoring of traffic for a website owner is inarguably legitimate interest if even just for DOS protection. The tracking discussed in this article is not about traffic measurement, it's much deeper individual tracking. Also... > the circulation is not a secret Isn't it? Like yes, there's a published figure, but is it verifiable? If we're discussing potential for "fraud" here, I don't really see how there's any difference between online and print circulation.
      - jefftk 4y ago
        > Monitoring of traffic for a website owner is inarguably legitimate interest if even just for DOS protection. Even in cases where the GDPR allows data collection for one purpose, that does not mean you can apply your collected data or analysis for a different purpose.
weird-eye-issue 4y ago
Yeah it's easy and is exactly how ads were first implemented. Go do some research on the history of Google Adsense Well big surprise: They don't perform as well. Don't you think there is a reason the ad industry went in the direction it did?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Now that they’re not allowed to go that direction, though, the old way looks more appealing.
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    Strange way of saying they have no other option
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      “No ads” is another option. See the title of the article up top of this discussion.
- logifail 4y ago
  Surely no CEO would actually struggle to choose between legal and poorly-performing vs illegal and better-performing?
  - youngtaff 4y ago
    Who says personalised ads are better performing? The companies who make the real money out of ads are ad tech vendors, with publishers often picking up the scraps It’s not suprising that people who’ve worked in personalised ads often promote them as the only way to fund the internet
    - logifail 4y ago
      > Who says personalised ads are better performing? I deliberately made my comment more generic, this isn't just about ads. Any senior manager worth his or her salt knows that staying on the right side of the law is significantly more important than supporting any dubious "product improvement" which is on the wrong side of the law.
judge2020 4y ago
A large factor is whether or not there are any contextual ads at all for the content being viewed. Sure, random sites with amazon product lists might benefit from letting Google Ads scrape their page then show ads related to the products, but random forums and game sites might not have any contextual ads that would sell. For example, dotapicker.com (which allows you to see counter-pick viability in Dota 2) runs ads but they're either ads of web-based video games that shows a lot of skin and have very vague wording to skirt Google Ads guidelines (about a quarter of the time), or random product and services related to my overall browsing history, eg. Amazon/Etsy/Ebay/etc or B2B services like Monday.com. Contextual ads definitely work where they can, which is why google.com ads are all contextual to your search, but it expands available ad real-estate to run targeted ads in places that otherwise would get no clicks.
soneil 4y ago
There's a decent amount that can still be done cleanly. You can count how many impressions were served vs how many clicked through. You can use campaign slugs to measure which sites sent more, or how effective different ads were. You can serve different ads to different geographic regions, and as you said - different pages .. Almost everything we currently decide when you visit a page, the only real concession is that it's scoped to the current page, rather than every page that we know you've visited. I'm honestly not convinced our current idea of targeted ads actually works. Continually showing me links to a product I bought someone for Christmas a month ago isn't remotely clever, despite being precisely targeted. "People shopping for guitars on Saturdays are more likely to convert to sales, than people shopping while they should be working" does not require storing PII, and is (hypothetically) more useful than "If you bought a guitar last week, surely you're more likely to buy a guitar this week".
- JTBooth 4y ago
  My friend has been at Facebook forever - apparently new hires often show up and say "I just bought a vacuum cleaner, why do you think I need a new one?" and the strategy of not showing you that ad gets tried over and over, and never actually improves clicks. Friend also doesn't have an explanation, apparently there are just people out there, who look just like you and me, but buy their vacuum cleaners two at a time a week apart. Mystery.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    That's what happens when you are so bad at predicting a thing that any noise overwhelms your signal. People sending stuff they brought back and buying something else exist, and also people buying for their friends. But if you had an actually good prediction of their behavior, you wouldn't need to proxy it by "brought a vacuum recently". Yet, companies insist that failure is a feature, and that their local maximum is the best possible world. And will keep harming advertisers, viewers and society to keep their position at that peak.
  - soneil 4y ago
    If not showing repeat vacuums does not improve clicks, I'd be very curious if it reduces clicks either. It seems like what you posit is only a mystery if we take it on faith that targeting works. Once that faith is lost, you can also approach it from the angle that if showing them something we think they want is just as effective as something we know they don't want, you're actually proving that "what we think they want" isn't working either. I mean, given "we know you've bought a vacuum cleaner" and "we think you'd like a kettle" - if ads for either are equally effective, either there's a lot more people collecting vacuums than either of us would have expected - or we're entirely wrong about the kettle. And it seems to me that our blind faith in targeted advertising leads us to wonder why people want so many vacuums.
stevesearer 4y ago
My website https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com does this. Our niche is office design content and we sell advertising primarily to office furniture manufacturers. The ads are hosted by us and are sold directly.
- jefftk 4y ago
  This approach definitely works, and I agree you can do it without any tracking. All that's needed is that the furniture manufacturers can tell how much of their purchases are coming via your site. But this is also not a model that can support a very large fraction of the existing web. Most sites aren't built from the ground up to have this kind of highly commercial tie-in.
  - stevesearer 4y ago
    Monetizing a general news website would definitely be quite hard with this model. *edit: that said there is a local news website in my city that has local ads for local services and businesses. Our specific case is weird in that contract furniture is mostly purchased through dealers so tracking sales isn’t as straightforward.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  We partially do something similar. I wrote an adserver that mainly serves contextual ads. We also serve consent-requiring ads if given, but with an adblocker (a bespoke adserver for a smallish site rarely gets blocked) or no consent, we serve HTML ads based on context.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fortran77 4y ago
I also wonder if these really targeted ads are cost effective. If ads were run as they used to be positioned in Newspapers and Magazines, a simple area of the screen that was set aside for an advertiser, with no targeting, no tracking, and performance measured simply by "impressions" and "clickthroughs" would they work at all? It would be much better for the users. (I'm always amazed at how unusable the websites of my local TV stations are with the adblocker off. Popups and blinking things everywhere, and the page just keeps changing out from under me.)
tzs 4y ago
It's not a question of whether or not they can exist. It's a question of whether or not they can be effective enough that the advertisers will pay enough for them to provide enough revenue to keep the site afloat. Someone reading a print article is probably a much stronger signal that they are interested in things related to the article or the topic of the publication than is someone reading an article on a website. If some random site runs an article about, say, a meteor shower you probably can't infer that the reader has more than a passing interest in astronomy. Even of a site that is focused on astronomy runs such an article they are still likely to get a lot of casual readers, such as people who heard on the news about an upcoming meteor shower and Googled to find more information. If on the other hand Sky & Telescope runs an article about a meteor shower in their printed magazine it is probably a safe bet that most people reading that have a fairly serious interest in astronomy. If I were trying to sell astronomical equipment I'd probably be willing to pay a lot more to run an ad in Sky & Telescope than I'd pay to run the same ad on a "free but with ads" astronomy website and I'd pay even less to run it on some non-astronomy site that happens to be running an astronomy article. I think this largely invalidates most of the "it worked for print so it will work on the web" arguments I've seen except maybe for websites with well enforced paywalls.
bryanlarsen 4y ago
You're trading one evil for another. If your primary revenue source is guitar manufacturers, how likely are you to write an honest guitar review?

tobr 4y ago

I wonder if you read the part about fraud detection?

diffeomorphism 4y ago
That argument is somewhat flimsy though. It is only a problem if you want to pay per view. If you just pay for "show it for one week" as in print then there is no issue.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  But in print it is knowable how many copies are going out, isn't it?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Even that can be fiddled. USAToday used to do it via deals with hotels to put one outside your room. Boom, extra copies!
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      Printing a newspaper at least costs a bit more money and there's a decent chance someone will read the copy of the paper in their hotel room. Fake Web traffic could easily dwarf real traffic.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yeah although ad buyers of any sophistication knew going in that a lot of certain newspapers were hotel copies (though arguably a lot of people read those), trade rags vs. consumer subscriptions, general vs. niche, etc. and took that into account. They still didn't have a great idea of how effective they were a lot of the time of course.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Advertisers would want to know something akin to circulation numbers before paying for placement though. And they would want to be reasonably confident those numbers aren't pumped by fraud. Maybe the web needs something like Nielsen ratings, where Verified real users voluntarily submit their browsing to help advertisers determine watch time.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I talk about this at the end of the post as well. I think a ratings panel approach doesn't apply well to the web because the web is so fragmented. (In a good way! I like that there are lots of independent sites!) Unless you had something like 10% of real users or a super representative 1% I think you'd have a big problem with getting realistic numbers outside huge sites.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yes. But even if you pay for a month placement on a given site, the ad buyer is still going to want an estimate of how many legitimate viewers see/saw your ad. It probably works better on things like podcasts but the bottom line is that you can't really trust me to tell you how many viewers my site had without some fraud detection mechanisms in place. (And even then fraud is apparently pretty rampant.)
  - Saris 4y ago
    I may be missing something, but why? Wouldn't the buyer just look at how many people arrived at their website from the ad?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      How do you know those clicks are people? (You can measure just conversions but that's a much higher bar for measuring an ad and a direct conversion may not even be your objective.)
    - jefftk 4y ago
      Bots can click through like any other visitors. They won't buy stuff, though, so if you're placing ads for people to directly take an expensive action ("performance advertising") you're mostly ok. Brand advertising, though, is very dependent on fraud detection because it doesn't have this clear connection. There's more about this near the end of the post.
      - tobr 4y ago
        Do you think it’s possible to measure how many people are coming from an ad on a specific site and buying something, without also resorting to illegal tracking?
        jefftk 4y ago
        That's a good point. I think a shopping site might be able to succeed in arguing that they had a legitimate interest in tracking how people arrived on their site, but possibly not. On the other hand, if half of your visitors consent to tracking that's enough to have a pretty good sense of the value you're getting from each source.
orangeoxidation 4y ago
Print can charge for ad placement, not impressions. But that's only possible because the number of subscribers, size and number of print runs, circulation are well known and hard to fake stats. The web cannot do that without tracking...
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Big sites (newspapers) could do it the same way - maybe independent reach surveys could be the data that they use to back up their web ad pricing.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I think that's one of the points though. Big sites can back up their digital reach claims such as by using third parties. But if vetting yourself for advertisers was to become a requirement, advertisers just might not bother with small sites. Though admittedly Google makes money off small sites--but I bet most of those small sites don't make enough to make note of.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      Google's vetting of small sites is pretty minimal. Instead they use fraud detection: vetting the traffic itself.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Right. Which is the point both of us are making I think. If you can't do some minimum floor of fraud detection more or less transparently and cheaply, you fall back on more heavyweight mechanisms and probably screen out any site that isn't "big."
- contravariant 4y ago
  Depends what you call tracking. Just like a newspaper company knows how many copies they distribute a website would know how many copies they've sent over the line. You might not trust them but I don't see why you'd think a newspaper would have a harder time claiming they've made more copies than they have.

emodendroket 4y ago

The argument is specific to electronic ads.

lucideer 4y ago
It isn't. What the ad industry refers to as "fraud detection" is just abuse of a monitoring system they didn't have access to in print (pay per view/click) - print ads were still deemed effective even without assurance of per-individual revenue. There's no reason electronic ads couldn't've been treated the same - the only difference is advertisers have been allowed to develop surveillance to gain granular revenue insights (and anything abusing that system of surveillance is labelled "fraud") Ad fraud is only legitimately "fraud" if you accept the pervasive surveillance it's "defrauding" is legitimate to begin with.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  I don't see how you figure. If I pay to put an ad in the New York Times, the circulation is not a secret. If I pay to put an ad in some Web site (or, worse, thousands of Web sites I don't know about in advance) then I have no insight whatsoever into how many impressions I'm getting if we decide it's illegitimate to try and measure traffic.
  - lucideer 4y ago
    You can measure traffic anonymously or pseudonymously without violating GDPR. Monitoring of traffic for a website owner is inarguably legitimate interest if even just for DOS protection. The tracking discussed in this article is not about traffic measurement, it's much deeper individual tracking. Also... > the circulation is not a secret Isn't it? Like yes, there's a published figure, but is it verifiable? If we're discussing potential for "fraud" here, I don't really see how there's any difference between online and print circulation.
    - jefftk 4y ago
      > Monitoring of traffic for a website owner is inarguably legitimate interest if even just for DOS protection. Even in cases where the GDPR allows data collection for one purpose, that does not mean you can apply your collected data or analysis for a different purpose.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago

Yeah it's easy and is exactly how ads were first implemented. Go do some research on the history of Google Adsense Well big surprise: They don't perform as well. Don't you think there is a reason the ad industry went in the direction it did?

ceejayoz 4y ago
Now that they’re not allowed to go that direction, though, the old way looks more appealing.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  Strange way of saying they have no other option
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    “No ads” is another option. See the title of the article up top of this discussion.
logifail 4y ago
Surely no CEO would actually struggle to choose between legal and poorly-performing vs illegal and better-performing?
- youngtaff 4y ago
  Who says personalised ads are better performing? The companies who make the real money out of ads are ad tech vendors, with publishers often picking up the scraps It’s not suprising that people who’ve worked in personalised ads often promote them as the only way to fund the internet
  - logifail 4y ago
    > Who says personalised ads are better performing? I deliberately made my comment more generic, this isn't just about ads. Any senior manager worth his or her salt knows that staying on the right side of the law is significantly more important than supporting any dubious "product improvement" which is on the wrong side of the law.

judge2020 4y ago

A large factor is whether or not there are any contextual ads at all for the content being viewed. Sure, random sites with amazon product lists might benefit from letting Google Ads scrape their page then show ads related to the products, but random forums and game sites might not have any contextual ads that would sell. For example, dotapicker.com (which allows you to see counter-pick viability in Dota 2) runs ads but they're either ads of web-based video games that shows a lot of skin and have very vague wording to skirt Google Ads guidelines (about a quarter of the time), or random product and services related to my overall browsing history, eg. Amazon/Etsy/Ebay/etc or B2B services like Monday.com. Contextual ads definitely work where they can, which is why google.com ads are all contextual to your search, but it expands available ad real-estate to run targeted ads in places that otherwise would get no clicks.

soneil 4y ago

There's a decent amount that can still be done cleanly. You can count how many impressions were served vs how many clicked through. You can use campaign slugs to measure which sites sent more, or how effective different ads were. You can serve different ads to different geographic regions, and as you said - different pages .. Almost everything we currently decide when you visit a page, the only real concession is that it's scoped to the current page, rather than every page that we know you've visited. I'm honestly not convinced our current idea of targeted ads actually works. Continually showing me links to a product I bought someone for Christmas a month ago isn't remotely clever, despite being precisely targeted. "People shopping for guitars on Saturdays are more likely to convert to sales, than people shopping while they should be working" does not require storing PII, and is (hypothetically) more useful than "If you bought a guitar last week, surely you're more likely to buy a guitar this week".

JTBooth 4y ago
My friend has been at Facebook forever - apparently new hires often show up and say "I just bought a vacuum cleaner, why do you think I need a new one?" and the strategy of not showing you that ad gets tried over and over, and never actually improves clicks. Friend also doesn't have an explanation, apparently there are just people out there, who look just like you and me, but buy their vacuum cleaners two at a time a week apart. Mystery.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  That's what happens when you are so bad at predicting a thing that any noise overwhelms your signal. People sending stuff they brought back and buying something else exist, and also people buying for their friends. But if you had an actually good prediction of their behavior, you wouldn't need to proxy it by "brought a vacuum recently". Yet, companies insist that failure is a feature, and that their local maximum is the best possible world. And will keep harming advertisers, viewers and society to keep their position at that peak.
- soneil 4y ago
  If not showing repeat vacuums does not improve clicks, I'd be very curious if it reduces clicks either. It seems like what you posit is only a mystery if we take it on faith that targeting works. Once that faith is lost, you can also approach it from the angle that if showing them something we think they want is just as effective as something we know they don't want, you're actually proving that "what we think they want" isn't working either. I mean, given "we know you've bought a vacuum cleaner" and "we think you'd like a kettle" - if ads for either are equally effective, either there's a lot more people collecting vacuums than either of us would have expected - or we're entirely wrong about the kettle. And it seems to me that our blind faith in targeted advertising leads us to wonder why people want so many vacuums.

stevesearer 4y ago

My website https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com does this. Our niche is office design content and we sell advertising primarily to office furniture manufacturers. The ads are hosted by us and are sold directly.

jefftk 4y ago
This approach definitely works, and I agree you can do it without any tracking. All that's needed is that the furniture manufacturers can tell how much of their purchases are coming via your site. But this is also not a model that can support a very large fraction of the existing web. Most sites aren't built from the ground up to have this kind of highly commercial tie-in.
- stevesearer 4y ago
  Monetizing a general news website would definitely be quite hard with this model. *edit: that said there is a local news website in my city that has local ads for local services and businesses. Our specific case is weird in that contract furniture is mostly purchased through dealers so tracking sales isn’t as straightforward.
Semaphor 4y ago
We partially do something similar. I wrote an adserver that mainly serves contextual ads. We also serve consent-requiring ads if given, but with an adblocker (a bespoke adserver for a smallish site rarely gets blocked) or no consent, we serve HTML ads based on context.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fortran77 4y ago

I also wonder if these really targeted ads are cost effective. If ads were run as they used to be positioned in Newspapers and Magazines, a simple area of the screen that was set aside for an advertiser, with no targeting, no tracking, and performance measured simply by "impressions" and "clickthroughs" would they work at all? It would be much better for the users. (I'm always amazed at how unusable the websites of my local TV stations are with the adblocker off. Popups and blinking things everywhere, and the page just keeps changing out from under me.)

tzs 4y ago

It's not a question of whether or not they can exist. It's a question of whether or not they can be effective enough that the advertisers will pay enough for them to provide enough revenue to keep the site afloat. Someone reading a print article is probably a much stronger signal that they are interested in things related to the article or the topic of the publication than is someone reading an article on a website. If some random site runs an article about, say, a meteor shower you probably can't infer that the reader has more than a passing interest in astronomy. Even of a site that is focused on astronomy runs such an article they are still likely to get a lot of casual readers, such as people who heard on the news about an upcoming meteor shower and Googled to find more information. If on the other hand Sky & Telescope runs an article about a meteor shower in their printed magazine it is probably a safe bet that most people reading that have a fairly serious interest in astronomy. If I were trying to sell astronomical equipment I'd probably be willing to pay a lot more to run an ad in Sky & Telescope than I'd pay to run the same ad on a "free but with ads" astronomy website and I'd pay even less to run it on some non-astronomy site that happens to be running an astronomy article. I think this largely invalidates most of the "it worked for print so it will work on the web" arguments I've seen except maybe for websites with well enforced paywalls.

bryanlarsen 4y ago

You're trading one evil for another. If your primary revenue source is guitar manufacturers, how likely are you to write an honest guitar review?