Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.
> Search ads get a much smaller lift from personalization.
Search itself has seen huge improvements from personalization. It's hard to imagine that the same shouldn't be the case for the ads shown for a particular query as with the results.
And what's the deal with "hard to imagine"? At some point it was hard to imagine we didnt have any witches. What the evidence?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-research-shows-personalize...
https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/...
But they still make money.
As in, they have a duty to breach ethics for profit as long as it's legal.
Stupid concept which I wish we could abolish but that's the way the economy is currently setup.
A company’s management has a duty to shareholders to work on behalf of the shareholders and not on behalf of their own well being. That usually means profit because that’s what most shareholders own the company for, not for charity. But there is no particular duty to maximize it at all costs. Damage to reputation and legal risk and the like are real concerns.
If anything, it’s the self-interested managers violating their duty who cut the most corners and burn goodwill, in the name of hitting short term goals and chasing their bonus.
It's not much, and there's certainly room for considering ethics. In fact, you can do nearly anything that isn't actively repurposing part of the business for the directors' own use. For example, one of the landmark cases affirmed the Chicago Cubs' right to leave tons of money on the table because their president believed that baseball was a "day-time sport" and wouldn't install lights for night games.
Companies absolutely can be good environmental stewards and pay their workers well in the interests of making money.Just like they can donate to charity while still doing proper fiduciary duty.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
Google are fighting tooth and nail to protect the illusion that their ads work.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
Even if you write Brooklyn USA, there are 22 places called Brooklyn in the USA.
So now your search term is "Pizza in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to search for the cost of a taxi... "Taxi prices in Brooklyn, NY, USA".
And now you want to know who won the baseball... "Who won the baseball, in USA". (Baseball means other things in other countries)
It's a staggering number of queries where the location changes the interpretation of what you're looking for, which changes the results.
Heck, I even get ads in the wrong language.
Hint: Instead of noticing that I’ve been doing manual labor recently, and inferring that I’m not a native English speaker, just use contextual targeting: show me ads in the same language as the content I’m watching.
Ad blockers are making the problems tracking-based much, much worse. Whatever signal is left after people block aggressively block trackers is actually just noise. Hopefully the market will see this and self-correct.
Why are your anecdotes relevant?