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I don't understand all the fuss about personalized ads. really. If Im going to see any ads I prefer them to be more relevant to me, not less. And if I do see so

• seabee 15y ago
  An upside to more precisely targeted advertising is that it lowers the cost of advertising, by way of reducing the number of eyeballs on an ad. A website with 1 million uniques can sell the space for $X to a big national business to whom it will be relevant to 30% of the userbase. Or, it could be divvied up between 20 local businesses from each user's location, selling the space to each for $0.1X, and being relevant to 50% of users. The website gets twice as much ad money, smaller businesses can afford to advertise, and users get slightly better ads. Is this really a bad thing?
  • uxp 15y ago
    I agree and do not think that model of advertising is a bad thing at all. It is something I find valuable as a user. I think that Marco is more complaining about how the advertising company in question figures out that you are you at that IP address and computer combination. It's the back end analytics they employ that is building and refining a database of people that continually use their products, of which the users either can't see, access and review, or are ignorant of in the first place. Being helpless is something we all fear as humans, and not having any say as to what kind of information may be in that database scares some people. Is it something that we all should be aware of? Probably. Should it keep us up at night? Probably not. +1 or Google+ helps them refine who they think we are, but really, they don't care who any of us are individually, they care about what will interest us next.