>do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling?
6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.
>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together.
Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a small guy and not having any targeting.
> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non-targeted ads.
This is not how it works.
If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your site -- right.
After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad networks with user cookie.
If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy. 5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.
If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go unmonetized.
>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.
nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target individual, just as in example above.
If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform, basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad-tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.
And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these days.
