Think about it: if the ad auction house knows nothing about you, then you'd expect to only get least-common-denominator ads. Everyone has a butt, after all.
A saner solution would be to target based on the content (like advertisers did for centuries before the internet).
If someone's reading an article about guitars, there's a good bet they'll respond more favorably to a guitar ad than to a picture of someone's ass. Common sense was a casualty in the transition to the internet.
Sure, that’s obvious. The problem is the tons of content that isn’t easily associated with a product or service. Like news and opinion (many of the article’s examples are from The NY Times)
There's books about everything, sure. It doesn't mean this approach is profitable enough to support the news gathering in the first place.
>more relevant option than someone's ass
That's a pretty low bar. I'm not arguing for this kind of ad. I'm only saying that keeping all ads exclusively topical would be highly unprofitable for many categories of information you find on the internet.
>News about crime -> advertise a home security system
That would create some pretty perverse incentives for news organizations to fear monger about local crime (more than usual that is). What could go wrong?
If someone's reading an article about guitars, there's a good bet they'll respond more favorably to a guitar ad than to a picture of someone's ass. Common sense was a casualty in the transition to the internet.