&gt; I&#x27;m not convinced that targeted advertising even works.<p>Yes, your intuition derived from a single anomalous data point (yourself) is <i>definitely</i> more accurate than the companies which have seen demonstrable success from targeted advertising.<p>If you wanted to argue that brand advertising doesn&#x27;t work, I might agree. Brand advertisers tend not to have high standards of data analysis.<p>Your publisher experience seems to actually be a case of wanting the former (targeted advertising) but getting the latter (brand advertisers), which can be a real problem because brand advertisers often overspend and undertarget.