> What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. What determines the "

> What you describe with searching would come down to pull advertising, because you are asking for it, not being shown it out of context. What determines the "context" for what you are "asking" to be advertised from? I'd argue that your choices about what to click, what content to read, etc., all also place as much context as what you explicitly type. More importantly though, as I mentioned in my other comment above about Leesa Mattresses, the specific benefit of ads is for push ads, not pull ads. The whole point is that there is something you want, but you've arrived at the conclusion that either it doesn't exist, or that you've already paid a search cost for trying to find it and you didn't find it and so you're less likely to engage in a pull search on your own. You may still want to know about the new product. Imagine it like an RSS feed. There are the "pull" subscriptions to the blogs you already know that you want. But what if you also want a certain kind of blog that you don't know about yet? If you only look at your RSS feed, it cannot ever possibly come. There has to be another feed, of sorts, that pushes content at you that you did not previously explicitly agree to. A lot of it will be noise, but sometimes it will show you something you wanted that's outside your sphere of pulls, and then you can add it to the pulls. I think this might even be the majority of things that I want. I don't usually respond to a direct need in my life and then say, "Hmm ... what are my options for solving this need?" Normally, I have vague awareness of a whole bunch of things I might want, and they are at various states of being "filed away for later" in my brain, which determines how likely or unlikely it is that I would exogenously come up with the thought to search for it. Many times I benefit from something I never asked to have hit my eyes nonetheless hitting them and making me aware of something I didn't know about, or that I had filed away and would not have actively generated the thought to find it. Whether the value-to-noise ratio is in favor of this arrangement is the big problem. The standard ads online have such a poor noise volume that it's almost never worth it. But, in principle, it could be worth it. Which is why the idea of a push ad is, potentially, a very good thing.