Why can targeted advertising be smart enough to show me ads at home for something I searched on my PC at work, but not smart enough to not show me the same ad 10x in a row or for services for which I’ve already subscribed?

Question

Why can targeted advertising be smart enough to show me ads at home for something I searched on my PC at work, but not smart enough to not show me the same ad 10x in a row or for services for which I’ve already subscribed?

In: 128

Answer 1

Because being better at it might require they were MUCH MORE creepily up in your business about it, and it would be a lot more expensive (at scale) in order to make it work for them.

To not show you the ad for the thing to which you subscribed (say, a cook on OnlyPans.com), FaceGoogle would have to know (from OnlyPans) that you actually subscribed–FaceGoogle would have to have some standing agreement where OnlyPans would send them huge (demographically valuable) data-dumps of all the FaceGoogle accounts that had created OnlyPans accounts, so FaceGoogle could avoid sending them repeat ads (but use that valuable info to sell BETTER ads, too!) This way, when FaceGoogle is considering what ad to show you, instead of just doing the work of figuring out that you like cast-iron cookware, they’d ALSO have to cross-check your subscriptions (OnlyPans, SetPlix, YouVideo, etc) to see which things NOT to show you… Or (more likely) they’d use the OnlyPans subscription info to figure out BETTER ads to send you, in order to defray the cost of that extra data handling.

But honestly, OnlyPans probably only pays $2/adclick… And OnlyPans doesn’t mind paying that $2 for an existing customer very much. Maybe it’s not worth the extra work. And maybe after FaceGoogle realizes you didn’t click on the OnlyPans ad (for whatever reason), they understand better that it’s not worth showing it to you anyway, and they downvote that ad in their auctions next week.

In fairness, there are “conversion fees” that FaceGoogle can ask for (basically “we’ll only charge you x% for showing your ad, if you give us an extra y% if that ad-click turns into a sale), and for some of these things it might be useful… But it’s a bunch of extra work, a bunch of extra expensive software and data… So it’s not always obviously worth it to the companies involved.