Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests

Are creepy advertisements really necessary to support the free web? A new academic study suggests they aren’t. Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years. But in one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. The study tracked millions of ad transactions at a large U.S. media company over the course of one week.