554
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
554 points (97.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43660 readers
1349 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah, pretty much this exactly. I can confirm almost everything listed here does get tracked and thrown in the mix, but in some ways it is a little more complicated. For example, eye tracking is a bit tin foil hat, but I'm sure some companies go that far.
For most game devs, the rabbit hole isn't that deep because of ad mediation networks.
For example, most company posting the ads really only see "how many people saw my ad" and "how many people clicked my ad" and "how many people downloaded the game after clicking". They often also have a say in "target demographics" etc but the data they get back usually doesn't dig much deeper unless they build tracking of your in game behavior etc. That's not to say the other stuff isn't tracked, but most of the other bits are not tracked by them. T
This stuff is all outsourced. There are entire advertising networks built around this stuff. Google has their own. Facebook has one. Unity has one. And there are plenty of others. Those companies are definitely looking more closely at things like individual user behavior and which ads get interaction etc and then make profiles of their users and decide what ads to serve them next based on their behavior with the ads they've been shown.
And because this is such a huge industry, there are then mediation networks built on top of that. Things like AppLovin/Ironsource and AdMob then build "mediators" that hook into advertising networks so that a game dev just asks to show a video ad, the mediator software asks all the advertising networks to bid on a the opportunity, and then it sells the game devs slot to the highest bidder. And THESE pieces of software are also tracking how the player interacts in order to justify their own pricing on the slots.
This shit is literally a fucking behemoth. Unity made a huge acquisition/merger with IronSource who's sole purpose is to bid out advertising slots. They were a multi billion dollar company just playing fucking middle man to other middle men. That's how insanely large this business is.
This is way worse than TV. It's way more fine grained. And not only do the advertisers get more data out of you, but these ad brokers get even more data out of you, and then these ad bidding mediators get even more data out of you.