The Advertising Bubble
I'm not convinced that targeted advertising even works. I see the advertising targeted at myself, it'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.I'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.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's no way I can tell Google "display ads in these categories".I tried running context sensitive ads from Amazon. I wanted ads for programming books in various categories I'd select. What I'd get is ads for the latest Batman movie, over and over, I finally removed them. I don't know how Amazon decided that visitors to a programming site wanted to look at Batman ads.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't. Ideally, I'd like to specify a list of categories for a context sensitive ad, like "programming books", and have Amazon scrape the page for keywords and then display programming books that are related to those keywords.