[KZerda]

Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners -- being able to say they have approximately x 18-24s is valuable to pitching partnerships, etc.

[cratermoon]

Selling ads for Red Bull to high school and collage age boys.

Selling ads for paroxetine to women aged 40-50.

[qmarchi]

Market research and marketing. Given their rollout of "quests", it's probably another marketing dimension that someone could tailor their ads for.

Ex, maybe don't show the "ad" during the day because they're likely at work if they're >24, or show a "quest" that's targeted towards nostalgia.

[thaumasiotes]

> Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners

I'm thinking about the workflow here.

First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male.

Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male.

Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior.

We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?

[kwhitefoot]

I think the world is being segmented into those who are exposed to targeted advertising and those who never or almost never see any advertising because we use uBlock Origin.

[soared]

Inferences have uses. I’ll always try to target marketing based on user segments that are deterministic and I’ve read how the data is collected. If I can’t find that, I’ll look for modeled/etc audiences that include inferred data points. It’s likely discord would have targeting/data for self-reported demographics at a smaller scale and higher price point. Then the inferred demographics at a larger scale and lower price point.