Tracking based advertising hasn't delivered on its promises. As a user, we're seeing more advertising than ever, and it turns out that seeing advertising for a thing which you shopped for and bought last week just isn't any better than seeing advertising that relates to the article I'm reading at the time. I'm also very skeptical that tracking based advertising actually works better for publishes either. Since the number of companies with good tracking data is so limited, the tracking companies (primarily Facebook & Google) have a near monopoly on user data and use that to extract more money out of advertisers, but the publishers see a decreasing fraction of that amount.
>it turns out that seeing advertising for a thing which you shopped for and bought last week just isn't any better than seeing advertising that relates to the article I'm reading at the time.
This is due to (1) not having enough data to build good algorithms and (2) advertising campaigns being set up poorly (its not only technically challenging but also expensive). This issue can actually be fixed and likely will in the future.
>I'm also very skeptical that tracking based advertising actually works better for publishes either.
The majority of publishers make more money from personalized ads. NYT and premium publishers don't necessarily since ads on NYT are valuable by itself, but ads on my blog are worthless by themselves. Add some user data, and ads on my blog are worth much more.
> This is due to (1) not having enough data to build good algorithms
Fundamentally advertising serves the needs of advertisers and not the needs of the viewer. No amount of additional data will make advertising less frustrating because ultimately neither the publisher, nor the advertiser cares if my experience is more or less frustrating.
More data won't result in less frustrating advertising, it will result in more effective advertising for the advertiser and more revenue flowing to the big ad companies as a result.
> The majority of publishers make more money from personalized ads. NYT and premium publishers don't necessarily since ads on NYT are valuable by itself, but ads on my blog are worthless by themselves. Add some user data, and ads on my blog are worth much more.
This is neither proven, nor entirely true. Advertising existed and was profitable before targeted advertising was created. Publishers made more money before Google/ Facebook took over and dominated the industry.
I've seen very few blogs which are worth a damn which have big advertising from Google/ Facebook on them. Mostly because good bloggers don't want to debase their otherwise good content.
