I'm surprised no one has mentioned that AdWords can target users and offer them ads based on what they think they might want. They're not always contextual.
Do you like to play games Reg?
Do you like to play games Reg?
Great timing, Spring is looming and I am making plans for Summer (Google knows this from watching my search history or annual credit card spend on travel.) It’s late afternoon, when I historically am distractible (witness reading about dinosaurs during my work day. And I ride quite a bit (easy to figure out when you’re Google).
I might be quite likely to click an ad for Sacred Rides (Free plug for Mike’s business!). But I would still feel sad that at the moment when I was reading something educational, I was lured away to think about something else.
I don’t know if Google can come up with a way to make quadrillions of dollars and to keep me from being sad. Maybe my feelings are simply a cost of doing business, or maybe what I want is impossible. But I think my sadness is independent of the attraction the ad holds for me personally. My issue is with the relationship between the ad and the content.
I don't think there can be another way. Advertising necessarily extracts value out of your attention, while simultaneously devaluing your browsing/watching/listening/driving/etc experience. Attention is a (mostly) zero-zum game.
If Google could find a way to put subliminal advertising on the web (and those glasses would sure be a pretty badass way to go about it), maybe it wouldn't make you as sad?
While it it usually, maybe even almost always, does, I don't think advertising is required to be a distraction.
If I'm searching for information on a product, say, a pair of headphones for my wife or a diet for myself, and I see ads for headphones or diet books, then that advertising can be very beneficial.
The problem comes when, like in the article at hand, there's a product or service, totally unrelated to what I'm searching for, that's being injected in my attention stream.
Arguably, Google's incredible financial success is founded on making that information infinitesimally more likely to be useful to the reader compared to, e.g., prime-time television.
Your search history, sure, but I don't think that Google can see credit-card spending ….