Can we really be sure that current user-targetet advertising is better than contextual advertising? It seems to me that nobody wants to step out of the safe model of targeted advertising, since it does work well enough, and so there haven't been big enough attempts at contextual advertising to really say one approach is better.
As an anecdotal test, I went to cnx-software.com and disabled my adblocker. The site has roughly 13 ads, 3 served by Google, the rest custom. Google tried to sell me toothpaste, while the custom ads are for things I'm actually tangentially interested in, like SoMs, embedded devices and assembly services. This kind of advertising obviously has a large overhead for the site admins right now, but I could definitely imagine an AdSense-like service that would distribute ads based on processing the site's contents.
Yes we can be sure, especially because user-targeting includes contextual signals. Google and Facebook are two of the most valuable companies on the planet because they have the science of ad targeting completely figured out.
That's like arguing heading to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1899 was a great idea because the companies selling picks and shovels in Seattle were making bank.
No. Those companies were making bank selling picks and shovels because picks and shovels are great for digging for gold, regardless of whether you actually find any.
Tired analogies and ridiculous strawman arguments aside, Facebook and Google are valuable because they have a valuable product in their advertising technology. What and how you use it is an entirely different issue.
