1) When I bought something on Amazon, they would advertise products other than the exact one I just purchased.
2) There was a chrome app which would, every week, ask me what personal projects I was working on and then replace the existing ads I saw with ads that would be relevant to the problems I'm willing to spend money on.
On top of that you get paid a few cents for answering the questions, which can accumulate pretty fast. I hate to sound like a shill, but I've been using the app and I never pay for Android Play apps anymore just because of credits accumulated through surveys I have answered. And I don't even take any of the questions that will add to my Ad profile, so I've actually been skipping about 80% of them.
Probably 98% of the time the correct answer is "none of the above" so that's what I pick and I get my 5-10cents. Occasionally I can tell that it's a survey that someone commissioned (asking about how likely you are to vote in some primary, etc) and I do tend to answer those as well.
Overall in the time I've had the app I've collected $60.19 (just checked history). Granted, this is from two years of use but it's good pocket change for Play Store purchases (hey, that $1.49 icon pack or watch face I wouldn't normally bother with? Purchase.)
I guess on some level I understand that like radio or free alt-weeklies, they sell access to eyeballs and earholes in order to fund the services I actually make use of. If they're gonna analyze my usage to try to determine which things are relevant and cut down on spam and wasted ad expenditures, I might as well make a few bucks from it in the process.
And as you say, sometimes I get one that I don't want to answer and it's pretty clearly laid out so I can decline.
Yes, I think that's the point of the app. It's basically selling to customers (businesses) more direct access to information that it'd normally gather through tracking or not at all. It's an interesting model in that it's a bit more transparent, and it does pay the customer directly. I wonder if we'll start seeing more of that in the future, where users actually "sell" their eyeballs directly.
It just sounds more honest to me.
I think a major change needs to happen. Advertising is falling to rock bottom, ad blockers are on the rise, and I think we're going to see more and more online apps and content sites going out of business.
Users need to start paying for the sites they visit. Why do people pay $2 for a simple mobile app they only use 2 or 3 times, but they refuse to pay a news site they read daily, that has a staff of writers and high quality content? I wonder if we'll see the majority of the internet behind a pay wall one day, where every site gives you a small preview of content or limited features, and you pay for full access.
This is completely false. The most relevant ad (statistically, based on real data) is going to be around something you actually want to buy, likely from a brand or product you saw recently, or are already a customer of. An e-book to lose 10 lbs in 10 days might be the best ad for someone who is in-market for short-term weight loss solutions, but is going to be a terrible ad for most people.
They're not mutually exclusive. If they were, the internet would be plastered with mortgage ads.