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> Do you have some questions you would like to ask instead? For example, regarding smaller players in the ad industry buying from a dozen tracking companies: d

> Do you have some questions you would like to ask instead? For example, regarding smaller players in the ad industry buying from a dozen tracking companies: does it really work? If yes it would either mean you have tremendously good algorithms to correlate anonymized data, or the data isn't really that anonymized to begin with. I mentioned google in the last paragraph because for them it's easy: they can track users better than anyone else and use it to show ads. It's all under the same hood. You dismiss the OP as a complete idiot, but doesn't it sound a least a bit likely that many smaller players just try to be google again here? Oh, google has so much data about the users to do ad targeting, we absolutely must do the same! There are so many places on the web where you have a pretty good idea about the demography of your visitors. Start from there. Most of the versatile places where you don't know who your visitors are are places like google, YouTube, Facebook, twitter, but they already know who their visitors are because they can do their own tracking, they don't need to buy any tracking data. So in the end I'm still wondering why there are two dozen trackers on CNN.com. who is buying all that data?

manigandham 8y ago
Late post but I didn't dismiss the OP as an idiot, I'm saying they are ignorant of how things work and extrapolating the state of technology based on visible end results is not accurate in anyway. As for the rest, I've described this in the previous 2 posts. Precise targeting is possible. Every ad network has their own special focus, and yes many are useless or have been obsolete thanks to an evolving market. Not all of it is about a single visitor identity either. However just because targeting is available does not mean it's always used or always worth the price. If you're selling toothbrushes, you don't need precise data. If you're selling million-dollar industrial equipment then it's worth paying the money to target the right people in their office. There are 1000s of factors that determine what you see and many are purely business and supply chain related with nothing to do with relevance so more often than not you'll see an ad that only has rough generic/contextual targeting and think the algorithm sucks when in reality nothing was applied in the first place.

manigandham 8y ago

Late post but I didn't dismiss the OP as an idiot, I'm saying they are ignorant of how things work and extrapolating the state of technology based on visible end results is not accurate in anyway. As for the rest, I've described this in the previous 2 posts. Precise targeting is possible. Every ad network has their own special focus, and yes many are useless or have been obsolete thanks to an evolving market. Not all of it is about a single visitor identity either. However just because targeting is available does not mean it's always used or always worth the price. If you're selling toothbrushes, you don't need precise data. If you're selling million-dollar industrial equipment then it's worth paying the money to target the right people in their office. There are 1000s of factors that determine what you see and many are purely business and supply chain related with nothing to do with relevance so more often than not you'll see an ad that only has rough generic/contextual targeting and think the algorithm sucks when in reality nothing was applied in the first place.