[cgiles]

Speaking as a PhD, I can assure you that just because PhDs research ways to make a thing work does not mean it does. Nor are they, or those hiring them, immune to presenting their results in the most optimistic possible way.

I am personally acquainted with several active fields that have been trying to make things work for 20+ years with very moderate success. They present their results which amount to "barely better than nothing" in order to keep funded. They also make the same arguments you do, "it stands to reason that it should work", to keep the money flowing.

There is the drug industry, which is chock full of new drugs that are barely better than placebo or generics, if they are at all. The results are hyped because it keeps the cash flowing. It would not be entirely true, but nor would it be too far off the mark, to say that almost the entire drug industry is based on fraud and exaggeration. And that industry is far more transparent WRT data and superficially altruistic than the advertising industry. This example is perfectly parallel because no one denies advertising works, just like no one denies antibiotics work, but the difference between new and old drugs, just like new and old advertising methods, seems to be greatly exaggerated.

Google built its entire empire based on contextual advertising, not behavioral targeting. With Facebook you may have an argument, but Facebook has a very special dataset not available anywhere else, and I would also add that Facebook makes the same amount of money whether behavioral targeting really works, or if they've just convinced their advertisers that it does.

I am neutral on the subject of whether it works because I have never looked into it, but "lots of self-interested people say that it does" is not convincing, and the fact that such an argument is so frequently made makes me think there is no actual proof.

[mochomocha]

> Google built its entire empire based on contextual advertising, not behavioral targeting.

True. But why do you think Google goes to a great length to track you all over the web? They literally have thousands of engineers doing just that. If there was 0 value for Google in behavioral targeting, and given their monopoly on search and the great value contextual advertising already brings for search, they surely wouldn't bother with tracking.

[cgiles]

Assuming that behavioral targeting does not work, which I do not know, several possible reasons:

1. They started tracking when behavioral targeting seemed like a reasonable hypothesis, and keep doing it now to build a dataset in case it might work in the future.

2. Google does lots of things that are speculative and generate no revenue, and the general attitude in the industry is "why not collect all data we can because storage is cheap in case we can somehow use or sell it later". If we applied your overall logic to every part of Google, they would probably have 500 employees.

3. If Google can persuade advertisers that it works, they still make more money from them even if Google knows that it does not. Thus BT can generate value for Google without generating any for advertisers.

4. If everyone else in the industry also makes these claims about behavioral targeting working, any company not claiming to do it too would be at a competitive disadvantage.

Also, it is possible that BT "works", say, 1% better than CA. In that case it technically "works and generates value" but most reasonable people would say in that case that it does not justify the privacy tradeoffs or general hype.

[mr_crankypants]

Google built their empire on contextual advertising, but it's not the only kind of advertising they do these days.

Also, Google's revenue isn't necessarily derived from what ads provide the highest ROI; it's derived from what ads people want to buy. Regardless of what anyone at Google thinks about contextual vs. behavioral ads, it's in Google's interest to go nuts with behavioral ads simply so that they aren't letting all the other adtech companies keep all the behavioral ad spend uncontested.

[eitland]

> But why do you think Google goes to a great length to track you all over the web? They literally have thousands of engineers doing just that.

As far as I understand even as the British empire became smaller the number of people employed to oversee the colonies went up.

Bureacracy will find a way to generate work for itself and it would be a shame to have all those data scientist wasting their time on fixing actual problems instead of making reports about how smart the current system is ;-)

[skybrian]

Knowing that the user is not a bot is pretty important to avoid ad fraud.

This might be enough incentive to do some user tracking, all by itself?

[Reedx]

> ...track you all over the web? They literally have thousands of engineers doing just that.

Seriously? If that's true, most of them must be hanging out on the roof.