tracking

Next year is mine and Golden's ten year anniversary. We are considering a vacation somewhere sunny that summer, but nothing is written in stone yet. Whether Golden is comfortable being away from the kids for that long or whether we decide that we have the money available to do this is still up in the air. However, I have been investigating places in the Caribbean lately so can I know what kind of prices and experiences we would be considering.

One key point in this whole process is that we would need to leave the kids somewhere. The logical thing to do is to leave them with my parents because they do not get enough time with their grandkids anyway. If we did this, we would fly from Pittsburgh to wherever we decided to go, and I have taken this into account in my searching.

Because of this, I was a little taken aback a few days ago when I was on Snopes. A Travelocity banner ad specifically targeted me based on a search I had performed previously. I know this because this is the only way the ad would know that I would want to fly from Pittsburgh. I understand the technology behind the ad (it simply stored my search in a cookie in my browser), but in my experience it marks the beginning of something that will become much more prevalent in the near future.

What is really surprising is that this may be the first time that I have been able to identify an ad targeted directly to me rather than to the demographic of people targeted by the content that I am accessing. For example, I have seen ads for the Mythbusters TV show on Snopes before, but I am pretty sure that was targeted more to the general Snopes audience rather than to me personally. I would have expected that, by now, I would have seen more advertising that targets me personally, especially from Google ads.

I am not entirely convinced that Google stock is worth the premium that it goes for in the market. Even so, it has a compelling advertising business model if it can be implemented properly. Why is Google willing to host so many useful services essentially for free? Google Earth can't be bringing in much revenue. Neither can Gmail. However, the information that Google can eventually collect about all of its users through the different applications that it hosts will eventually be incredibly valuable to its targeted advertising.

I think that the feasibility of using the Internet to host a large volume of proprietary content for free depends on this targeted marketing. Many content producers are going out of business or having a tough time finding realistic revenue streams (think newspapers). At some point those who produce high-quality content will demand a higher price or get out of the business. Since targeted ads can command better revenue, it makes sense that such ads could be the savior of much of the content online. If it isn't, look forward to a lot of content going away or ceasing to be free.