It's fascinating that the enshittification is taking place on both ends of Google. I would have thought that the slow bastardization of search was for the benefit of advertizers but it's bad for everyone except Google.

Google used to have really robust tools for keyword research. They were even useful for finding overlooked niche subjects that paid well as an AdSense publisher. But as far as I can tell, they've completely removed those tools, instead pushing ignorance and "trust us" messages.

The ad categories offered by various companies vary and I think adsense is nowhere near the closest-targetable network there is.

Try showing an ad to only Python software developers. Not IT repair shops. Not software developers writing exclusively C. I think you may be able to do that with keyword targeting on AdWords, once you avoid the bear traps you mentioned, but it's hard.

OTOH, I bet there are ad companies that will help you target "30-40 years, single, lonely" for dating ads (that might be possible even with adsense), and definitely people with specific diseases to peddle medicine to them.

Occasionally someone posts a list of categories used by one or multiple networks and they can be the most specific, or far too broad (see: python dev).

I'm extremely surprised that I haven't seen ad companies offering specifically to advertise to people working at specific companies. I'm sure it exists, just haven't seen it. This would be incredibly valuable both for job ads, industry specific ads (this would benefit from breaking down by department), and also criminals and spies trying to get people from specific companies infected with malware.

What's also important to understand is that these categories don't need to be accurate. "This person has a 80% chance to be in category X" is more than good enough. Hell, 10% would probably already work.

The right ads pay really well. A life insurance click can be worth tens of dollars, because the conversion is worth thousands. So if there is a 10% chance you're interested in buying life insurance, bombarding you with those ads makes sense.

I'm managing a Google ad campaign for a non profit with a budget of a few hundred dollars a month. I came up with some keywords but have been using their automated stuff too. If you could suggest one thing I can do to improve what would it be?

Google also has the world convinced that because they collect mountains of data on everyone, that their ad targeting is superhuman. They want people to believe that they know people so well that they can show someone an ad for something they want before they even know they want it.

Meanwhile, I lived in a country where I didn't speak one of the local languages, and every Google ad I saw was in that local language. The ads were 100% wasted because I had no idea what they were even advertising. This is despite my constant visiting English-only webpages, despite my browser settings saying which languages I spoke, and so-on.

If Google can't even be bothered to track what language to use for the ad, their ad tech is clearly worse than slapping a generic ad next to a newspaper article then printing up a million newspapers.

It's a good start but you absolutely want in-browser ad blockers too. Not all crap is served from dedicated garbage serving hostnames.

My guess is that it's a couple watts while you're actively using the internet, mostly due to the extra CPU load a few bad ads cause when they're on your screen. Without having done the math I expect all the servers, data transfer etc. to be negligible, on a per-user basis, because they serve so many users.

That's another interesting thing btw. Most of the "internet thing X uses Y amount of electricity" are utter bullshit and massively exaggerating. What uses most power on desktop/TV is the screen. The second biggest consumer is likely your router (which is on whether you use it or not, but the studies usually ascribe all of the standby usage to your active usage - this makes sense if you try to look at "how much CO2 does all our digital stuff including 'having an Internet connection' cause" but not if you're trying to look at "how much extra CO2 does activity X cause, assuming I already have an internet connection because I'm not gonna live in a cave").

That's one possibility. It's also possible that you have decent privacy settings keeping them from knowing too much about you, or they simply use a shitty ad network that's bad at targeting. Even the major ones are impressively bad.

There also aren't many advertisers interested in these ad slots since they know people watch them only for the reward, and games are also a frequent source of ad fraud (I think), so serious advertisers avoid them.

Also, mobile gamers are likely not the most attractive audience for the high paying stuff.

It's usually terrible advertisers. They've got their account set to show to everyone in a super broad range. Like "uses a phone, under 50, in country X" and that's all they're going by.

This is combined with Google's shitty "we'll tell you how much to spend and who to spend it on, trust us!" Automation and dark patterns, which just spaffs all your money in places you don't want to. Such as mobile apps! Which used to be one click to disable but now its 200+! Or location, which now defaults to "people who have shown interest in your country" when it used to just show ads to people in the country. Or keyword matching which used to be a lot more strict, but now they keep broadening things. (One headphone company we worked with spent thousands on "telephone" keywords, that they never entered into their account)

I am a fairly liberal militant atheist and nearly all my political ads are for hard right stuff. I have concerns about the future when people start wondering what exactly they are paying for in terms of ads vs sales. Trying to sell me on Epoch Times or Prague-U is like trying to selling red meat to vegans.

Those are different models. Ads can be sold pay per view, pay per click, or even pay per conversion (the store reports when the customer buys something and only pays for that).

These can be converted by multiplying with the estimated probabilities. For example, if the scammer is willing to pay $1 for the click, and the probability that the user will click is estimated to be one-in-500, the view would be worth 0.2 cents.

If the scammer is willing to pay $20 for the conversion (because it means they successfully scammed someone out of $30), they'd need to succeed scamming one in 20 users that clicked for this to work out.

Works the same for legit businesses of course, where the business will consider total lifetime value (not just the current sale - you might also subscribe to something and keep paying for 2 years, or come back to buy again). Advertising / customer acquisition costs are a huge part of many businesses, which is why running online ad platforms is so obscenely profitable.

In this case, I don't know who in the chain will do the conversion - if the bid will be for a click and the ad platform will estimate how likely you are to click, or if the bidder makes the guess and bids based on that. The bidder in this case would be another ad platform of course, acting on behalf of the actual advertiser, and nobody in this "ecosystem" trusts each other. It's full of companies trying to scam each other or companies offering services to validate that the data someone is feeding you is real.