>Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.

This seems to me what "targeted advertising" should mean - NYT says "for all routes of nytimes.com/politics, show political ads. If it's local news, open it up to classifieds for local business." Etc.

If someone's on the page, is that not enough information?

In other words: targeted advertising is about making ads cheeper for advertisers, whereas the traditional assumption is that the real estate is valuable and desirable. e.g. companies want their ads in the New York Times or the Superbowl. Targeted advertising is a way of spreading ad dollars out more, which ultimately is detrimental to large publishers as well as being unethical on the data harvesting side. (I choose to adhere to the ACM's guideline that collecting personal information without informed consent is unethical.)

In other words, you're better off with affiliate links and content marketing than you are with algorithmic banner ads.

Heck, even Google AdSense scans your site to match ads with the content (source: I've tried using AdSense). They just don't rely exclusively on the content for ad targetting.

for actual comparisons: https://thomashunter.name/posts/2019-01-09-generic-banner-ad...

For sure, the type of person who reads the NYT politics section in English is _already_ a fairly niche audience compared to everyone who uses the internet.

I think you came really close to the salient point, but then missed it: Targeted advertising is, as you said, really not that much more effective as context-based advertising, unless you're an ad-tracking behemoth trying to convince companies they need your product.

The whole surveillance capitalism nonsense we live under is a way for ad networks to justify their existence. If you're a company that has data on everyone, you need to convince people they need that data to accurately sell ads, and targeted advertising exists solely for that purpose. The amount of cross-site tracking that these companies are able to do outscales what any company could manage to accomplish themselves, or even for a smaller competitor to step in, so as long as targeting users across the entire Internet is believed to be a must-have, these ad behemoths stay on top.