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Advertisers/ad networks need to serve ads from their own domains so that they can identify the visitor via 3rd-party cookies and serve the most appropriate ad.

• iamaelephant 9y ago
  No, they don't "need" to do that. Not any more than newspaper, magazine or television advertisers "need" to know anything about the individuals seeing the ad, beyond the target demographic of the publication. They do it because there's money in it, but if website owners could put the welfare of their customers ahead of the relentless pursuit of profit by serving manually curated, static, untargeted ads we could have a much nicer web.
• notzorbo3 9y ago
  > serve the most appropriate ad Is it just me, or is this approach not very useful? I'll google for a certain product, do a little bit of research and then buy what I finally picked. Then I'm stuck with seeing ads for similar products for the forseeable future. Ads for a product I already bought and no longer have an interest in. I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fits the page I'm currently looking at without being personalized.
  • geocar 9y ago
    > I think ads would actually do better if they're just targeted to the demographic that fits the page I'm currently looking at without being personalized. There's a gap: Getting search/retargeting interest information is almost instant, but finding out you've purchased is hard and takes time. However it's effective enough: Retargeting boosts most verticals by as much as 3-5x, and where that one click pays $1 the ads cost about $3 per thousand to display them.