> Online targeted ads are way better.

Sure, but there are a lot of ethical problems with them.

Imagine starting a service that paired individual shoppers with a passive handler to follow them around a shopping mall to build dossiers including:

    * everything they pick up and look at
    * what they eat in the food court
    * the clothing styles and sizes they try on
    * what their transportation to the mall was
    * their race, gender, age, and apparent ethnicity
    * etc...

How long would you put up with that?

Can we really be sure that current user-targetet advertising is better than contextual advertising? It seems to me that nobody wants to step out of the safe model of targeted advertising, since it does work well enough, and so there haven't been big enough attempts at contextual advertising to really say one approach is better. As an anecdotal test, I went to cnx-software.com and disabled my adblocker. The site has roughly 13 ads, 3 served by Google, the rest custom. Google tried to sell me toothpaste, while the custom ads are for things I'm actually tangentially interested in, like SoMs, embedded devices and assembly services. This kind of advertising obviously has a large overhead for the site admins right now, but I could definitely imagine an AdSense-like service that would distribute ads based on processing the site's contents.