Through profiling, now ad companies know — or, at least, aim to know — exactly who is reading a certain site or watching a certain video.<br />Ad companies don’t just know the user, but they also know the user’s context — for instance,<br />whether you’re at work or at home, or whether you’re in the mood for shopping or not.<br />One consequence of this model is that it pays for a lot of content<br />that wouldn’t have been funded under the old model — now a teenager can attract a few million followers on YouTube, sign up for the company’s revenue-sharing program and make money from all of the programmatic sponsors.<br />“It wasn’t possible for us to be certain that we were reaching<br />that audience, so we used the content of certain programming to define that audience,” said Brian Lesser, the chief executive of GroupM, a division of the advertising giant WPP.<br />In other words, instead of targeting men, they’d run ads on shows they thought men liked to watch<br />— a good enough solution, except for all the women and non-shavers who were also watching.<br />And given that advertising pays for nearly the entirety of what we see and do online, the upside of all the hand-wringing is<br />that we are now examining how all of that money gets spent — a process that should lead to better ads, and better media, too.<br />Luckily the people were easy to find: They were all watching or reading one of a handful of media<br />offerings — three TV networks, some big glossy magazines and one or two newspapers in every town.
