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The unfortunate truth is that tracking and individual targeting improves CTR. Advertisers pay for clicks. Until someone comes up with a more profitable metric,

• Millennium 14y ago
  Certainly those behaviors improve CTR, but they do so at the cost of a shrinking viewer base: drastically shrinking, in fact, and it's about to shrink even more. Is the current point in the market still at a point where the improvement in CTR outweighs the decrease in audience?
  • rgbrgb 14y ago
    If you can put numbers to that argument, then advertisers will stop tracking tomorrow. There's nothing malicious going on, just business.
  • untog 14y ago
    the cost of a shrinking viewer base: drastically shrinking, in fact, and it's about to shrink even more. Are you sure? The vast majority of users are entirely ignorant of tracking, and don't care much even when they do know of it.
• tomjen3 14y ago
  Not really. Facebook knows more about me than the STASI did about most of its citizens. Yet the best ads they can show me are for dating sites -- something I am not that interested in, and certainly wouldn't pay for -- and totally ignore all my likes. If marketeers had a single brain cell then the ads on my facebook page would be covered in geeky offers, interesting books, computer hardware, etc. It is the same with Google. A couple of weeks after I signed the papers for my new appartment I got a ton of ads for the same (crappy) appartment site -- even though I didn't need two appartments, I needed cheap paint and a moving van. I am considering taking a weekend or so and writing a piece of software that can do it better than the current crop of marketeers, because they are as useless as Dilberts boss.