>Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.

This seems to me what "targeted advertising" should mean - NYT says "for all routes of nytimes.com/politics, show political ads. If it's local news, open it up to classifieds for local business." Etc.

If someone's on the page, is that not enough information?

To show the ad to the consumer? I'd say yes. To sell the ad, when google is selling hyper informative profiles down the road. Maybe not. Not that people who buy ads or keywords or whatever have the best idea of who they should sell it to

But also, if it's general interest that makes sense as well. Say an ad for BestBuy while browsing the NYT. That's one of the benefits of well trafficked sites - you can reach a pretty wide swath of the population.

In this sense I would like it if site took advertisement more seriously. Asking feedback, allowing personalization, selecting a few "endorsed" ads (as a quick and cheap Boolean review).

For Google and Facebook it doesn't make sense, but for a newspaper i would expect some selection on the ads they show.

BTW Stackoverflow does many of these things with their ads.

In other words: targeted advertising is about making ads cheeper for advertisers, whereas the traditional assumption is that the real estate is valuable and desirable. e.g. companies want their ads in the New York Times or the Superbowl. Targeted advertising is a way of spreading ad dollars out more, which ultimately is detrimental to large publishers as well as being unethical on the data harvesting side. (I choose to adhere to the ACM's guideline that collecting personal information without informed consent is unethical.)

It’s actually about raising the price for advertisers:

Instead of only political books being able to advertise on that page, they’re bidding against beef jerky and cars and so on. This raises the price for the ad slot by creating (false) demand.

Without those out-of-place, targeted ads there would be less demand for every ad slot, and people could bid less for them.

In theory it can go either way. If you can target ads better to get more return per money spent, then it is worthwhile to spend more on advertising. In the end more on advertising is going to result in more money to publishers.

In other words, you're better off with affiliate links and content marketing than you are with algorithmic banner ads.

Heck, even Google AdSense scans your site to match ads with the content (source: I've tried using AdSense). They just don't rely exclusively on the content for ad targetting.

for actual comparisons: https://thomashunter.name/posts/2019-01-09-generic-banner-ad...

For sure, the type of person who reads the NYT politics section in English is _already_ a fairly niche audience compared to everyone who uses the internet.

I think you came really close to the salient point, but then missed it: Targeted advertising is, as you said, really not that much more effective as context-based advertising, unless you're an ad-tracking behemoth trying to convince companies they need your product.

The whole surveillance capitalism nonsense we live under is a way for ad networks to justify their existence. If you're a company that has data on everyone, you need to convince people they need that data to accurately sell ads, and targeted advertising exists solely for that purpose. The amount of cross-site tracking that these companies are able to do outscales what any company could manage to accomplish themselves, or even for a smaller competitor to step in, so as long as targeting users across the entire Internet is believed to be a must-have, these ad behemoths stay on top.