I browse most of the time without extensions other than a cookie editor, since I've encountered a number of weird bugs in my company's own product that turned out not to be bugs but weird interactions with browser extensions I was running. I also read a lot of news articles both on big sites like the WSJ and whatever regional news outlets turn up in my news searches. That is to say that ad networks should (presumably) have a great profile on me and be able to show super-relevant ads.
But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought.
I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only.
The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.
I often joke that I'll believe "The machines are taking over" immediately after I get a relevant ad on Facebook. Of all places - they should know exactly what I like and what I would buy. They haven't got a clue.
I just finished "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and there is a discussion about this in there. Turns out its very hard to get from "what you like" to "what I want to buy." Google actually has an advantage here, in that it is easier to identify search phrases that are part of the pre-buying process.
I will actually click ads if they show me things that interest me. I'm not a miser or trying to hide my true interests from advertisers. But weirdly I still seem to see more ads relevant to my interests when reading a niche print publication (e.g. Scuba Diving) than I do reading a newspaper article about diving online. The ad networks have had years to gather all sorts of information about me and the end result seems more scatter-brained than old fashioned print ads.
Whenever I browse without an adblocker, I get constant ads for my employer.
I work for a mid-size telecom that exclusively does B2B. There's no way an ad network would be serving up that many ads for that company unless their ad network knew I'm connected to it. It's also bizarre, because I'm the last person who needs to be advertised to about the company.
It's probably just standard remarketing to people who have visited the website or a specific page on the site recently. Something you probably do a lot as a employee. It's actually a good thing privacy-wise that it's not easy to be more fine-grained in filtering audiences on adwords, though the marketing department could probably remove employees from the audience if they had visited an employee login page or something that would show you weren't just a random potential customer.
But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought.
I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only.
The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.