Privacy-killing behavioral ad targeting isn’t worth it for publishers, study says | Fast Company

But revisiting the "A lot of great technologies end up being strategically important without living up to their initial road map" logic in this bitcoin article, consider all of the applications of behavioral targeting for propaganda campaigns and other domains...

"In one of the first empirical studies looking at behavioral ads–that is, online ads that rely on cookies to track users around the web in order to learn more about them–researchers found that the ads are virtually worthless to publishers, reports the Wall Street Journal.

For the study, researchers at the University of Minnesota; University of California, Irvine; and Carnegie Mellon University tracked millions of ad transactions at “a large U.S. media company” over the course of a week. What those researchers found is that cookie-enabled ads only ended up bringing in 4% more revenue for publishers than ads shown to users that didn’t rely on cooking-tracking technologies.

The finding is significant because for years cookie-based ads have been extolled as major revenue drivers for publishers by those in the online ad industry. If the study is correct, then that’s not actually the case at all and it could have major ramifications for online privacy. If publishers aren’t benefitting much more from cookie-based behavioral ads than from non-cookie-based ads, there would be little room for argument that the privacy-killing, intrusive ad technology is a fair trade-off for using a free internet."

Privacy-killing behavioral ad targeting isn’t worth it for publishers, study says | Fast Company