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And then it comes around full circle when to get advertisers you need to market them properly to specific people who would be most likely to buy their products. Then you start collecting data on users to figure out who would match with what, then the customer becomes the product.


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Indeed. And if you had an ad to market you want it targeted. Targeting can only occur if there is data.

They collect your data and sell ads to advertisers based on segments you fall into

You do realize that the collection and mining of data exponentially increases the chances that advertisers with your interests will be shown to you? That is exactly the point.

And what is that data used for, if not targetted advertising?

The data is a means to an end: the ability to provide advertisers with a way to reach very specific groups of people, and a way for advertising platforms to track not just the same user, but a very detailed user profile.

Knowing what people's interests are is worth diddly-squat until you use that knowledge to push ads to them that are likely to resonate with them.


Well, of course they do. One of the best sources of ad data is social data. If you know where, when, and what someone likes, you can easily target them.

Don't ALL companies want you to be more involved with them?


They don't "need" to, but they can use all that data to build a better profile on you and thus sell advertisers better targeting.

a case can be made that advertising at the correct moment in time for a particular individual is information. you want a new mattress, open the pipe, mattresses galore, buy, close pipe. the key is to figure out the when and the personalisation, search is the first to get close to it (and it's still not perfect - the next thing i'd like to see is trimming but i assume that'll take that semantic web thing i keep hearing about)

How? Data-driven ad systems are built specifically to target people who have a high probability of conversion. The perfect person for such a system is one that would constantly (i.e. impulsively) buy or convert.

If that's what you're working on your "user" is the advertiser.

Makes sense. I was thinking more so from the side of a marketer being able to target people who specifically state they want your product and excluding people who already own it. This way you're not spending ad dollars on people who already have converted. Really interesting how much you can do with this data.

Or to build up profiles they can match to sell ads against for demographic targeting.

humans already do that and even provide advertising data along with it

I would venture to say that the ads are tied directly into their core DNA of search. The ads are tied to keywords and demographics (which is basically an ad searching for the correct person to be shown to).

Personalized ads are the biggest motivation for data collection.

Yes. This is about picking your customer. If your customer is the advertising network then their desires are very different compared to, say, somebody who wants a network analysis tool.

It's a good idea to pick customers whose interests align with yours.


They probably ask their advertisers.

They sell ad placement by observing all of your behaviors and figuring out what you want to do. (Refining the other statement ).

People will actually visit the site... so they get traffic. They could then advertise to through more creative, less user-unfriendly ways (besides having giant ad networks that store tons of user data on each person, along with 20 different vendors’ trackers to make sure each department gets the same data about each user in a very slightly different way).

More importantly, they're there to gather information about individual users so that the ad provider can sell that information..
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