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A comment on Only 17% of consumers believe personalized ads are ethical, survey says (2019). Parent comment

Re:Only 17% of consumers believe personalized ads are ethica... by TeMPOraL on Monday November 16, 2020 @03:32AM (#25109439)
Key word being, "more likely". An unfortunate effect of scale and cheapness of digital ads is that even if the effect of retargeting on any given visitor is very tiny, it still makes economical sense to deploy it, as it'll add up. The extra marginal annoyance and frustration inflicted on everyone who views those ads is, of course, just an externality.
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Re:Only 17% of consumers believe personalized ads are ethica... by JoshTriplett on Monday November 16, 2020 @04:36PM (#25117268)
That's absolutely true.

In particular, there's an interesting distorting effect caused by large-scale ad vendors and sites that want ad revenue. They always show an ad, and the only question is which ad. While I think ads should just not exist (and people should universally block them), it would be an interestingly different world if the alternatives were "useful ad" versus "no ad".

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