mparr4

niche brands are not a thing of this century alone

Sure, but targeting ads enabled a massive increase in volume of niche brands.

In particular, brands whose target customer is fairly specific (so totally untargeted ads, like TV commercials, magazine ads, etc, wouldn't have positive ROI) and whose product isn't already known to the customer (if it were known, then content marketing/SEO could work).

Couldn't you advertise or sponsor user groups, forums, clubs, etc

Yes, just like before. However targeting ads dramatically expanded the audience and effectiveness of marketing spend. Finding the right clubs/groups and figuring out how to advertise to what are probably unique groups is hard. Flipping a switch on a FB campaign is easy. And not everyone is in a club, but just about everyone has a FB account.

Also don't forget..

I'm not saying anything about who is leading or whether it is good or bad, just that the iOS14 change was like taking a sledgehammer to many businesses like mine.

Prior to the change we had tried a handful of sales channels and only found positive ROI in FB ads. And those FB ads experienced a step change w/ the iOS14 release. Judging from the D2C/PPC communities I'm a part of, my experience was not unique.

Like it or not, FB targeting enabled a certain category of businesses to exist, and now that category is reduced. As I said in another comment, this isn't a judgement about whether we as a society are better or worse off, just that this is the cost of that decision.

Thank you for the clarification. Obviously I did not know that about Safari & IDFA.

If that's the case though, I'm a bit confused as to why attribution got so much worse. I'm seeing 50% attribution dropoff.

I don't agree with you that ruhdgjns is not engaging in good faith. He's engaging with my comment. Given that I am a D2C business owner and therefore a modern advertiser, that's a pretty reasonable view for him to consider.

Re: "go back to fundamentals" and "not necessary", I wish it were so simple. In my comment I mention that it makes selling niche products much harder, which is absolutely the case. Some businesses just can't exist without good targeting. Maybe we as a society don't want those businesses to exist, and that's fine, but it's not as simple of a matter of these businesses needing to be better at advertising. With good targeting a business can exist that only has a small subset of customers in the world. A business like this likely can't afford to acquire customers via traditional advertising.

This makes many D2C businesses much harder and a subset of those businesses won't be able to succeed at all in this climate. Again, I'm not passing any judgement on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for society, just that it is the case. Good targeting is absolutely necessary for some businesses.

Apple made accessing a devices IDFA (device fingerprint) a permissioned resource. Needless to say it is not a popular permission to grant.

Cross-app activity can't be tracked without this permission. So if you see an ad for a product on facebook, then you pop over to Safari, search for the product, and purchase it, facebook can't attribute that sale to that ad.

The consequence of this is that goal attribution (like sales) for ads is harder, so FBs models can't learn as well who would be interested in the products. You'll see less relevant ads and companies' cost of customer acquisition will go up.

It's easy to imagine a world with less effective ad targeting since most media doesn't have effective targeting. Think pharmaceutical commercials on TV.

My own bias: I run a niche D2C brand whose business model got wrecked by this change!

FWIW I run a D2C brand and the iOS 14 change hurt badly.

We are able to attribute something like half of the sales we used to. The main consequence of this is the FB models can't learn who our customers are as well, resulting in an increase in our cost of customer acquisition.

It makes selling niche products much harder.

I wrote another post that is both an homage to Google Earth and an illustration of how these maps differ:

If Google Earth Were Designed For Your Wall: https://ramblemaps.com/if-google-earth-were-designed-for-wal...

It’s actually a custom form (not canned) and we had previously had an additional field for area of interest but it lowered the conversion rate of the form so we dropped it.

Getting emails is more important to our business than knowing where folks want to see. We also don’t want folks to have the expectation that we’ll make a map because they requested it. Each map takes a lot of work and in our experience requesters rarely become purchasers.

(Also, we see the page you submitted your email on, which is often a search query that was not successful, which tells us what you were looking for!)

That step could certainly be its own post of greater length than this one.

For this particular map it involves separate curve adjustment layers for the water and land. We generally increase the steepness of the curve (increasing contrast) and then adjust individual color channels to get the color balance right. We also do some localized burning (darkening) in areas where pushing the curve resulted in some pixels getting too bright.

I’d love to put together a post with lots of pictures and details about how we do this. It is motivating knowing there is an audience for it.

Thanks for the link. We used Lambert Conformal Conic for Europe and Robinson for Asia, but I'm not thrilled with the Asia projection.

I really want to be able to change the latitude the projection is centered on, but haven't been able to figure out how to move that point yet, so we've got more skew near the pole than we do at the bottom of the map. Feels like it could be better.

We sell wall art. You likely don't look at a painting by your favorite artist and say "This is overpriced. I bet the canvas and paint only cost $10."

Also, Ramble Maps is a business. We have material costs, shipping costs, advertising costs, rent. We accept returns (and pay for return shipping), spend time making maps, answering emails, and writing posts like this.

And finally, can you let me know where you can get those materials? Those prices are far better than what we pay!

Realistically, what they are doing is making full resolution prints on commercially available large-format photograph printers, with their effort going into tweaking the shaded relief algorithms and applying photoshop filters to boost local contrast.

Yes, exactly this.

Marketing copy exaggerates a bit, film at 11.

And yes, also this, ha. We sell wall art, so the article is intended to convey that for something you look at on a wall, we're running up against the limits of what a human can see, with normal vision, at any reasonable viewing distance. It is absolutely true that someone with good vision, the right light, and a magnifying glass could probably see some dots, but that's not typically how wall art is viewed, which is what we design for.

Thank you!

It's a question we often get, but not a product we're looking to pursue. I think it would be prohibitively expensive to do it right and I'm not confident there's a big enough market for it.

I could be dead wrong about this, of course.

Fall of 2014 for the LiDAR. I am not sure about the other DEM though.

Thank you! Unfortunately we won't be doing any choose-your-own maps, we really do spend a bunch of time on each one. I don't think we could maintain nearly the level of quality that we like.

I'd love to map Sydney. We're doing a city push right now but starting with US cities, as selling internationally adds some business complexity that we've been trying to avoid so far. As the business grows, we certainly do hope to have more maps outside of the US, and to be able to sell there as well!

We have an India map. The other commenters are right: no borders, just terrain.

https://ramblemaps.com/india-map

Have you considered transfering your methods from the macro to the micro world?

Not to this point, but it's a very interesting idea. Someone else mentioned electron micrograph imagery, which would look incredible.

I assume you're referring to the azimuth we place the sun for the hillshade? If so, it varies, though it is almost always coming from the top, generally from the upper left.

Exactly where it is coming from depends on the terrain, we'll move it around within a 45 degree window around 337.5 and see what makes the particular landscape look best.

We've got mars and the moon on the site. I've been wanting to do some of the recently released Martian craters. They would look killer!

I've never thought of electron micrographs but just did a google image search and wow, I have to agree!

I agree. Posting to HN = soliciting advice. Thanks for yours!

Fixed humans. Will review the rest! Anything in particular on the home page you don't like?

We settled on this choice after originally using alternate projections. The source data is not in mercator, we specifically reproject to mercator.

I don't disagree with you, I personally prefer other projections for many of our maps, but after the hundredth comment saying "you got the shape of [MY STATE] wrong, you idiots!" we realized that people think of their state (and country, in the case of CONUS) in mercator, so we decided it wasn't worth fighting that fight.

For other countries, we tend to use locale specific projections.

One projection question for you, while we're chatting: do you have a favorite Asian projection? I wanted to center the projection on center mass, which would mean changing the poles, but couldn't figure that out!

All public. At this point if the data doesn't exist, we're out of luck.

I don't anticipate wall art being lucrative enough to commission our own scans. For areas the size of what we tend to map you need an airplane, a drone would take weeks to survey some of them.

Nope, the state maps are pure elevation maps. We do have some city maps and are working on more right now (Seattle and LA are in progress).

Our black and white images (such as the image on the linked article) aren't satellite images at all, they are high resolution elevation models that we've used GIS software to light and create hillshade.

We do have some color images that use satellite imagery and the creation of those images is going to be the subject of my next post. We do things like remove the natural hillshade and apply our own (due to a quirk of human perception where sun coming from below causes terrain to be perceived as inverted) and blending images from different days, etc.

Re: is this really a "map?" That's a comment we get quite a bit, especially in FB comments on our ads. These images are not traditional maps, but a map is a depiction/representation, which these are. Anyway, "map" is certainly shorter than "visual representation of a geographic area" so it's what we go with.

Re: detail. It's all about the size of the area you are printing. Our world map uses 30-meter data, but you'd need to print it on the side of a building to see the limit to the detail. So in our sizes, using 3-5cm data wouldn't improve the maps, you wouldn't be able to see any of that detail. We only make maps if that is true.

I have not. If there's a market for it, I'd do it, but I would guess there isn't.

Might be a cool experiment to try for a map. If nothing else, it sounds fun.

Thanks! Yea, I think we are as close as wall art can get to a high quality screen - we optimize for contrast on the print. And while unlike a screen you need to provide light for a print, the effect of the light on the print is pretty engaging. It changes as you move around it. (It is not, please nobody buy one thinking they are!)

If you're ever looking to print some photos to hang on your wall, it's definitely worth considering metallic paper + face mounted acrylic glass. It has unrivaled "pop" among print options.

I don't know much about photolithography, but a quick search is intriguing. I'll have to put it on my to-learn-about list.

I plan to write another post on that with some images to show the steps, but the process differs a bit between our black+white and our satellite+hillshade images.

For the black and white, we pull in the relevant elevation models, merging various sources as necessary, compose the map (rotate if it helps), choose hillshade angle to highlight desired terrain, then export to photoshop.

Having been doing this for a while now we spend most of our time in Photoshop, adjusting color curves and healing irregularities (there seem to be more for LiDAR than for the standard 1/3 arc second DEM).

For our satellite + hillshade maps the process is a bit more involved. We actually remove the natural hillshade from the source image and add our own. This helps with perception of terrain (humans tend to perceive terrain as inverted if the sunlight is coming from the bottom of the image) and allows us to really play off the metallic print and get some pop. Even more photoshopping for these "maps."

Nope. We are friends from high school. He found PGs essays in 2009 and we started our first company together in 2010.

Ramble Maps co-owner here. Happy to answer any questions about our process or our maps.

Co-owner and I are long-time HNers. Psyched to be on the front page!

A fellow HNer and I just yesterday released some maps where we take aerial and/or satellite imagery and combine it with hillshade to create high resolution map art.

The website is our work as well. Would love feedback from the HN crowd. Happy to answer any questions as well.

Indeed. I don't understand how my car works, but I am able to use it to get around.