That's how Google used to do things back in the day! I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable. All I've heard is the "we'll keep showing you ads for toasters after you bought one because you'd buy another if the first one breaks" meme but where's the hard evidence on personalized ads getting more clicks?! Contextual at least intuitively seems to make way more sense.
> I still don't get how in the hell could personalized ads be more profitable.
It's because it creates a new profitable business model for BigTech.
Personalized ads require that the network collect as much data about you as possible. The idea is to use this data by trying to create some behaviour model to determine how and when a user purchases stuff. (Currently this doesn't really work as advertised, as you guessed).
But the US government, with PRISM, created a new revenue stream for BigTech - buying the raw data of the users directly. As with any government contract, this is actually way more profitable than serving ads to cheapskate internet users. Seeing how easily and successfully BigTech is able to get this data, the US has effectively decided to privatise spying (partially) to the BigTech. To sabotage the creation of regulation and privacy laws that may prevent such data harvesting, and to create an even more profitable market for the BigTech, they have also started to rope in other countries too. (See Five Eyes (FVEY) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ).
