Yes.
> the problem with targeted advertising is the targeting
Is it? The problem with advertisement is the advertisement. I don't like to see ads at all, but one thing I know for sure, I'd take targeted ads at all time over random ads.
> People don't like seeing their web history funnel into their advertising.
No. This is the problem YOU have with it. Most of the non-tech people I know have no idea what you are even talking about.
For example, if I search for "how to do a Subaru oil change" it's the perfect opportunity for the search engine to show me ads related to motor oil, Subarus, car maintenance videos, etc... If I opt in to sharing my location with the search engine they could also show me ads from local repair shops and car dealers.
Later on when I'm reading an article about dog training, I don't want to see ads about fixing my car, show me ads related to dogs. Use the context of the page for targeting.
Where does contextual advertising/influencing switch from being helpful to being gaslighting?
Your normal usage isn't dog training or subaru oil changes. It's idle nonsense like whether Kim Kardashian is angry with Courtney Cox or whatever. There's not enough to sell you that's contextual. People have an idealized vision of what they spend time on. It's nothing like this productive stuff you're talking about.
Next time you are in a waiting room flip through the magazines that are sitting there. The ads are targeted to the likely readers of those magazines.
Online targeted ads are way better.
Not to be annoying, but advertising is serious money. If you think you can do good contextual advertising you will become rich very easily. Anyone will. It's hard for me to believe that no one is doing this supposedly easy and effective thing well since all the incentives are there.
Sure, but there are a lot of ethical problems with them.
Imagine starting a service that paired individual shoppers with a passive handler to follow them around a shopping mall to build dossiers including:
* everything they pick up and look at
* what they eat in the food court
* the clothing styles and sizes they try on
* what their transportation to the mall was
* their race, gender, age, and apparent ethnicity
* etc...
My wife buys diapers online, then ads for diapers show up on my computer.
I go shopping for underwear on one device, and then when reading a technical forum with co-workers on a different device, there's ads with people just wearing underwear.
The tracking is extremely excessive.
Maybe I should be the change and write it myself
If someone is paying 10 usd for conversion and you have chance to convert 1%, another one has 90% chance to convert but paying lets say 0.10 usd, even if you have 90 times better ad, ad network will show you the 1% one.
Then we end up with crap like the cookie banner - which completely ruined the internet for me.
There is not a day I don't have to close one of those and browser extensions to block them are nowhere as good as blocking ads. Not to mention, accepting all the cookies is one click, while rejecting them either require 1 minute of thinking or browsing through popups and menus.
The fact that 99% of the people don't care is over their head. If people cared they would be using duckduckgo.
Funnily enough, I use duckduckgo and I think it's a great Google replacement - but I don't care about being tracked, I just appreciate the features (especially code snippets in search)
Why?
It's not the content you want and the fundamental idea behind targeted ads is precise manipulation of people's behavior which is an extremely dangerous thing to have at scale.