The Advertising Bubble
I&#x27;m not convinced that targeted advertising even works. I see the advertising targeted at myself, it&#x27;s pretty obvious why I get those ads. For example, I bought a kitchen sink faucet on line. For months afterwards, I received constant ads for the exact same faucet - as if I had multiple kitchens.<p>I&#x27;ve tried running context sensitive ads on my own site. I happen to believe that appropriate advertising is something users want - for example, I buy hot rod magazines specifically to get the ads for parts and other cool stuff for my car.<p>The context sensitive ads Google servers are just not interesting, and they happen to be one of a small handful of ads repeated over and over. There&#x27;s no way I can tell Google &quot;display ads in these categories&quot;.<p>I tried running context sensitive ads from Amazon. I wanted ads for programming books in various categories I&#x27;d select. What I&#x27;d get is ads for the latest Batman movie, over and over, I finally removed them. I don&#x27;t know how Amazon decided that visitors to a programming site wanted to look at Batman ads.<p>There is a way to put an Amazon ad on the site for a specific product. But those get stale after a while. Again, I want to be able to list categories of the kinds of ads that would be appropriate for a particular page, but I can&#x27;t. Ideally, I&#x27;d like to specify a list of categories for a context sensitive ad, like &quot;programming books&quot;, and have Amazon scrape the page for keywords and then display programming books that are related to those keywords.