Targeted Ads Are Missing The Point

2013-07-27

I use adblock plus and block extensions though chrome, the result is that I don't see many ads. A few site I often visit and have reasonable ads get whitelisted, because I understand that this often is the only revenue they get for operating the site. add

Recently I stumbled over a severe case of targeted advertisement. I recently bought a new desk chair and recently visited the website of my mobile operator to check on a specific deal they had. A few days later I visited, like I often do some of my favorite web comic and guess what ads I had? The website selling the desk chairs with exactly the chair I bought and my mobile provider.

I don't know about you, but I operate in modes. The reason why the YouTube related video feature or the amazon recommendations work, is because I am already in the watch gameplay videos or buy stuff mode. In the case I previously mentioned, I was in the reading web comics mode and these two website and companies I did not want to care about at that time.

Let's take a short trek back in time to the mid 90s. At that time Google was a small company that operated a search engine. They had two ways of displaying ads, the first was AdWords, where publishers could add sponsored "search result" on a given search term. This worked somewhat well, since they almost looked like real search results and where within the subject the user looked for.

The second was AdSense, where website operators put a little piece of JavaScript in their website and an add was served. The really innovative feature of AdSense was that the ad was selected based on the content of the page it was displayed on. Doing this was easy for Google, since they operated a search engine and knew anyway what content was on the page. This worked way better than any other ad providers, since they had at best categories to choose form.

Some time around 2000 advertisers got the idea that if you figure out what your ad viewers like, they would respond better to the adds. Basically this makes sense and probably they could also back this up with some statistics. Anyway this is how amazon did it with their recommendations and that worked really well.

The problem is that, at least for me, people operate in modes and displaying something out of context will either be ignored or remarked negatively. In addition I don't get the tracking part. I am visiting a certain site about a certain topic, well guess what, I am currently just now interested in exactly that topic and only now very susceptible to ads on this given topic.

I think that matching the ad to the content of the website and not the user makes significantly more sense. This is aggravated since people are quite upset about tracking and starting to take defensive measures, such as rejecting taking codes or poisoning their profiles, which again reduces the usefulness of ads.

I hope that sanity will start to come into the web advertisement world and I can see many funny ads about interesting web comics on the page of my web comics. Maybe I will learn about a new one.