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"People who have done things that suggest they're interested in buying this" is a highly valuable segment. Even if half of those people have bought the thing, i

"People who have done things that suggest they're interested in buying this" is a highly valuable segment. Even if half of those people have bought the thing, it's worth advertising to them if it means you get the other half's eyeballs. They don't know that you bought it - they just know that you do things like those who want to buy. Like, I went to a coding bootcamp. Making that decision means browsing the web like someone who is interested in that bootcamp. I ended up seeing a ton of advertisements for the bootcamp I was currently enrolled in. If you do things that are similar to what a company's target market is, people will notice that and turn that into cash.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Oh, but quite often they do know. Amazon knows perfectly well what I bought on their site. Vendor X should know perfectly well what I bought on their own site, using their own store instead of showing me the ad for that product for the next two months.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  Even if Amazon knows and organizes the fact that you've bought the thing, that isn't what the ad space is selling. They're selling space that targets a particular kind of person, and whether or not you've bought the thing doesn't matter. Like, the company buying the advertisement slot wants to target a particular sort of person, and this is measured in various ways. So the network selling the advertisement slot wants to group visitors into different buckets based on these measurements, and sell to whoever happens to pay the most for a bucket that view happens to land on. Basically, it's the end result of a process that confuses a measure with what it's measuring. You want to optimize for "interested in buying X". What you can actually look at is "things that people interested in buying X do more often than people who aren't interested". People buying advertising optimize for that, since it's actually possible to do so. And then since buyers actually care about the measurable proxies, that's what ad-space sellers give.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Oh, but quite often they do know. Amazon knows perfectly well what I bought on their site. Vendor X should know perfectly well what I bought on their own site, using their own store instead of showing me the ad for that product for the next two months.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
Even if Amazon knows and organizes the fact that you've bought the thing, that isn't what the ad space is selling. They're selling space that targets a particular kind of person, and whether or not you've bought the thing doesn't matter. Like, the company buying the advertisement slot wants to target a particular sort of person, and this is measured in various ways. So the network selling the advertisement slot wants to group visitors into different buckets based on these measurements, and sell to whoever happens to pay the most for a bucket that view happens to land on. Basically, it's the end result of a process that confuses a measure with what it's measuring. You want to optimize for "interested in buying X". What you can actually look at is "things that people interested in buying X do more often than people who aren't interested". People buying advertising optimize for that, since it's actually possible to do so. And then since buyers actually care about the measurable proxies, that's what ad-space sellers give.