They still do that. Large content sites still sell ads and can do so in any way they want, exclusivity deals, results oriented, click based, you name it. The inventory they can't sell directly they sell to Google or whoever is paying best at that time. They can even throw an ad view into ad networks to be bid on and show the winning bid ad to the user. The whole bidding war happens in real time for each user for each ad sometimes across multiple ad networks.

I suppose a lot of people here know how real time bidding networks work but I was mind blown the first time I saw that.

Because a newspaper does not have enough user targeting data; their ads would not be as valuable since they would not be as well targeted.

I'm tired of saying this but either I've been caught in a fluke of some kind or Google really isn't so good at advertising.

Or they are optimizing to fleece dumb advertisers or I am extreme outlier.

Instagram however, a service that I hardly use, manages to present ads that look interesting again and again.

Newspapers used to be relatively well targeted. You know people reading the Podunk Times are probably in the Podunk region. But now the competition has surged ahead, and you can target on Facebook "people who run as a hobby and are African American and live in a metro with great than >500K population" or whatever.

But from a consumer point of view, is it better to be targeted in a loose way by people guessing about your demographics or an exact way by people who know your demos? And as a publisher, how the hell are you supposed to make content if all the money is gobbled up by the platforms?

I think we should return to status quo ante by just banning the collection of targeting data. We know that the old ad ecosystem worked because we observed it working, and we know that the new one sucks because we observe publishers going bankrupt and privacy being violated.

The ads I see on my paper newspaper are often better “targeted” than the ones I see (or block ;) ) on their website.

Of course this is not data, but the parent post has an interesting stance.