Exactly. But why is that 'creepy'?
< snip >
In this case they missed. You don't really want a generator. To that I simply say they goofed. It l's still very new and I give them credit that its very hard to program a machine to figure out human intent. I'm a human and I can rarely figure you people out.
They miss quite often -- probably more often than not, in my experience. For many Adsense publishers (including myself), revenues immediately plummeted when Google starting weighting user histories in ad selection. They have about a gazillion pages on their own user forums about this, and many publishers (including myself) are in the process of moving to other programs.
As it happens, the ability for Google to use "interest-based advertising" on any given site can be opted out of by the publisher, which in my experience will roughly double the CTR and revenue. But even doing that, the revenue is still less than half what it was a few years ago, when ad selection was purely contextual, before Google started weighting user history.
Part of the reason probably has to do with the lagging economy, but I think the bigger part is that a lot more users have simply become creeped out enough that they're blocking Adsense ads. Adblock does
not block Adsense by default, but users can elect to block Adsense or subscribe to a blocking list that includes Adsense, and I believe that more users are doing just that.
For most of the Adwords / Adsense programs' history, the ads were considered sufficiently polite and well-behaved that few users bothered blocking them. They also had among the highest CTRs and revenue of any ads, at least in part because both the ads and the sites they linked to were polite and well-behaved, and the ads were almost always context-relevant. The ads were exemplary of Web advertising done right.
Those days are over.
What you, Captain, are able to correctly shrug off as the work of inanimate robots, seriously creeps out many (or maybe most) users. This is especially true when the scraped content and the ads derived from it are not quite so boring as generators. Targeting can be very disturbing to many users, and even more so when the targeting touches upon sensitive issues.
I know a guy, for example, who got himself in some legal trouble about 25 years ago, did some time, fixed whatever was wrong with himself, and has been a model citizen ever since he got out of prison. But roughly half the ads he gets on Adwords / Adsense are from companies who want to sell him copies of his own criminal record.
He's shown me some of these ads. They are worded in ways that make it clear that the ads "know" that the current user has a record. He's also told me that some of the ads work his own name and location into the ad ("Joe Blow, your criminal record can be seen by your neighbors in Your Town, USA!"). I can understand how that would creep him out.
I cleared his cache and cookies, and installed the NAI opt-out thingy on his browser, but that doesn't work too well. I think part of the ad selection must be IP-based, because the ads also show up on other of his family members' computers that he doesn't use, but which are fed by the same router. There doesn't seem to be any way to fully "opt out."
Another thing that makes many users uncomfortable is geolocation. It can come in handy, or it can seriously creep people out, depending on how it's used.
For example, I would have considered geolocation very handy when I was searching for blue-rug juniper recently (Google is a great search engine if you're actually looking for ads), and Google showed me ads for local greenhouses that sold blue-rug juniper. But it starts getting creepy when the ads are for anonymous romantic trysts with women in the town I live in -- especially because most of the women in the ads aren't even good-looking.
But even in the blue-rug juniper case, notice that I used the words "
would have considered it handy." I did that deliberately, because I don't like any sort of geolocation. Why? Because I have deliberately disabled, opted out of, or spoofed geolocation in every way I can think of -- but Google still knows where I am! That's why!
I even have an entry in the Firefox config file overriding WiFi-based geolocation and defining my location as an igloo in Nunavut, Canada. But Google laughs heartily at such efforts. There is no such thing as opting out.
The only way to hide your location from Google is to use a proxy server, a virgin browser (or private browsing using some other browser than Chrome), via a wired connection (not Wi-Fi), and then immediately block Google from planting any cookies as soon as you open the browser, and to not log in to any actual Google account nor use Google Search during the session. That will keep you private for a while -- maybe even until the end of the browsing session.
I personally take another tack. I randomly search for all manner of things in which I have absolutely no interest whatsoever, and which are as unrelated from each other as I can manage, throughout the course of every day. I do this deliberately, just to mess with Google, and to muck up their concept of me as severely as possible. Whenever I search for something that I actually am interested in, I open a proxy connection and private browsing -- just so I don't pollute my Google profile with anything factual.
Long story short, I play with Google. I secretly enjoy the fact that I have Google's robots scratching their heads wondering why I'm interested in such diverse things as: How many Webkins can fit in a cloud; whether there are dodo birds in the steeples of Westminster Abbey; whether Vladimar Putin wears boxers or briefs; where can one buy blue suede shoes; did Jesus wear Birkenstock sandals; do vampires fart; and whatever other bizarre things pop in to my head during the course of a day.
But let's consider the case of a semi-sophisticated user who is creeped out because Google seems to "know" too much about him, and is serving him "creepy" ads, which even know his name and where he lives. So he opts out of user tracking and interest-based advertising: And the creepy ads continue. So he downloads the NAI opt-out cookie: And the creepy ads continue. So he disables or spoofs browser-based geolocation: And the creepy ads continue.
What, exactly, is this semi-sophisticated user going to do once he gets disgusted with Adsense / Adwords ads that seem to "know" who he is, where he is, and what he's thinking, every time he gets on the Web? Eventually, he's just going to block them. And you know what? Even as a publisher, I really don't blame him at all.
Also consider that many families share computers, often without separate user accounts, which means that interest information mined from each user's activities will affect the ads seen by the others. From a publisher point of view, this is one of the reasons why "interest-based" ad selection doesn't work. From a user's perspective, it's just more creepiness; and people don't like being creeped out.
-Rich
