[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.