Disclaimer: I work for Google on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These views are my own and don't express those of my employer. From where I'm sitting real-time b

Disclaimer: I work for Google on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These views are my own and don't express those of my employer. From where I'm sitting real-time bidding ("RTB") does indeed seem to be the future of display advertising. Personally I don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn. As much as on sites like this there are those who speak of the evils of advertising, the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of the Internet can exist. The article notes: > In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new service called Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send promotions for Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched for trips to Spain. For the record, Google still maintains a strict separation between search and display. This quote is bizarre: > Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, The New York Times is suddenly concerned with being egalitarian? Really? Also: > ... based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control. www.google.com/ads/preferences/ Click "Opt out". (Side note: where is the Facebook equivalent?) Another point: > This is bad news for magazines and newspapers: once advertisers were able to track and reach specific consumers, they became less interested in where their ads appeared and more interested in who, specifically, was seeing them. Online advertising has the merit of being completely measurable in that you can determine to a fraction of a cent how much you spent on impressions, how many of those impressions resulted in a click (resulting in an effective CPC) and how many of those became customers (effective CPA). Traditional media is suffering because probably since it's existed--and anyone who has bought radio, TV or print advertising should be aware of this--is that the audience numbers are basically a lie. So yes, it's bad news for that lie to be exposed for those perpetuating the lie I guess. > For example, by knowing discrete and apparently unconnected facts about you — your shirt color, gait, driving habits and the e-mail font you use — companies could, using algorithms that sort the profiles of hundreds of thousands of people like you, accurately predict what kind of porn you surf. Say what now? An important point: > ... none of these classifications was accurate, although Tawakol noted that they would become more precise the more I browsed the Web while allowing BlueKai cookies on my computer. The underlying point here is that advertisers aren't interested in you, the individual, they're interested in you as part of an audience. Note: > And BlueKai says that its advertising partners can’t identify by name the consumers they’re tracking, and they generally don’t want to. > But it was a place where people could define themselves and be surprised by experiences in the future that didn’t reflect preferences they expressed in the past. Really? We're going to wax lyrical about TV advertising in the 1960s now?