Your comment adds a lot to the conversation, so I don’t want to be more contrary than necessary.
It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years).
Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a security is it’s most recent price: ad historical CTR and user historical CTR (called “clickiness” in the business) are basically the whole show when predicting user cross ad CTR. The big shops like to ham up their data advantage with one hand (to advertisers) while washing the other hand of it (to regulators).
As with so many things Hanlon’s Razor cuts deeply here: if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work.
It’s nonetheless a shame that it’s so universally misunderstood how ad-supported megacorps make their money that even highly sophisticated users of the web still talk about the value of personal data (source: I ran Facebook’s ads backend for years).
Much like the highest information-gain feature for the future price of a security is it’s most recent price: ad historical CTR and user historical CTR (called “clickiness” in the business) are basically the whole show when predicting user cross ad CTR. The big shops like to ham up their data advantage with one hand (to advertisers) while washing the other hand of it (to regulators).
As with so many things Hanlon’s Razor cuts deeply here: if your browsing history can juice CTR prediction then I’ve never seen it. I have seen careers premised on that idea, but I’ve never seen it work.