## Adblocking Reading Response (Before)![](https://i.imgur.com/sAXIjK7.jpg) (After)![](https://i.imgur.com/WWBiLPp.jpg) Targeted advertising provides advertising content to customers based on their interests, characteristics and behaviors. Advertisers identify customers by tracking their activity on the Internet. There are many different ways to do this, but one of the most common is using cookies. Cookies are small files that websites create when you visit them. They save these files on your device and use them to track your activity. When you shop for baby clothes on an e-commerce site, it tracks your engagement and uses that information to identify the products you're most interested in. Later, when you read the news or scroll down your social media feeds, you may see similar advertisements for baby clothing products. But babies grow quickly, and after a few months, the clothes you're looking for will no longer be relevant. Advertisers understand this, so they will also try to learn about you in other ways - like through your search engine history and your social media activity. Search engines and social media platforms are happy to share this information with advertisers. So targeted advertising is getting better at predicting what customers want to buy and then showing them the right product at the right time with the right advertising benefits: Targeted advertising is very successful Targeted Advertising allows brands to interact with people who are interested in their products. This allows them to spend less time and money showing ads to unlikely customers. This directly benefits advertisers and internet users. For internet users, this means ads have a higher chance of being relevant and useful. Without targeting, internet ads operate on the same metrics as TV ads—they have to reach the widest possible audience to be profitable. This will leave many people's niche interests underserved. For advertisers, targeted advertising is a transformative technology that has changed almost every aspect of the industry. Targeted advertising enables small businesses serving well-defined customer niches to compete with larger companies and enables advertisers to segment audiences based on real-world data. This means advertisers can: Reduce costs. The cost of targeted advertising is significantly lower than that of traditional offline advertising. The automated advertising platform also has built-in overspend protection. Once the limit is reached, the platform will stop showing your ad. Get instant results. Most advertising strategies take several months to produce results. For example, SEO campaigns typically don't show progress for at least six months. A well-researched digital ad campaign can generate leads and increase revenue within days. Get higher returns. Sophisticated targeting algorithms reduce customer acquisition costs by showing ads specifically to those most likely to become customers. This lowers the price per click while significantly increasing sales and revenue. Re-engage users over time. Few people buy a product after one impression. Targeted advertising allows brands to build impressions across multiple channels and re-engage users, bringing them closer to becoming valuable lifetime customers. The bad: Digital privacy concerns If it sounds uncomfortable for a single global search engine company and social media giant to sell your data to advertisers, many internet users feel that targeted advertising violates their privacy. California's CCPA and Europe's GDPR are some of the most comprehensive data privacy regulations in existence today. Among other things, they require sites to be transparent about the data they collect on site visitors and for sites to allow users to opt out of ad tracking. Google, Apple and Mozilla have followed suit, promising to block third-party tracking cookies from their web browsers by default. At first, this might seem odd—after all, 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising. These companies will actually benefit from the change, as each operates its own advertising marketplace. Google doesn't need third-party cookie data because it already has plenty of first-hand data to work with. If it can provide a better user experience for the average person by eliminating third-party ads while serving more of its own, that's even better for Google. It's important to realize that third-party cookies are only one element of this. Emerging data science techniques allow organizations like Google and Facebook to accurately predict how individuals will respond to ad content without even looking at individual user data. Even if third-party advertisers cannot, they will still use their own first-party data to serve targeted ads to users. Ultimately, targeted advertising and digital privacy have a complex relationship. Each internet user has a unique definition of which targeted ads are "useful" and which are "creepy." Some are even considering radical moves to ban targeted advertising outright. What would a world without targeted advertising look like? If targeted advertising becomes illegal tomorrow, social media platforms and free apps will have to find new ways to make up for lost ad revenue. The Internet as we know it today was built on the monetization opportunities offered by targeted advertising. Without it, many services we take for granted would have to start charging subscription fees. However, advertisers won't be moving away from targeted advertising so soon. They just need to collect the data and find relevant uses on their own. First-party data will become the most valuable currency in the advertising world. For now, both lawmakers and big tech companies appear to be moving toward that goal. Advertisers who take note will be well prepared for the change. AdTargeting is an ad targeting tool - Facebook interest and Google keyword targeting to discover hidden or niche ad words for large audiences, pinpoint audiences, steal competitor traffic, help advertisers maximize their investment in ad audience targeting response rate. Adblock Plus, as an ad blocking plug-in, Adblock Plus has existed for almost 10 years, it has landed on five browser platforms, 300 million downloads, and is helping more than 50 million users block all kinds of annoying ads every day. . However, starting in 2011, it launched the "Acceptable Ads" program, which means that instead of blocking all ads, it began to selectively allow some. This has brought more controversy to Adblock Plus, which is already in the gap between advertisers, website owners and users. Almost every once in a while, someone criticizes it. Until recently, the matter was turned up again, when the Financial Times reported that Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others were quietly paying Eyeo, the developer behind the popular ad-blocking software Adblock Plus, in exchange for the latter not blocking any more its advertising. It controls the display portals of tens of millions of people's web pages, and decides what ads they can or can't see - a seemingly terrifying force, but it's actually an independent developer that started in 2006. open source project. Even now, it has become a team of more than 30 people, but once the words "big company", "quietly" and "paid release" are added, it seems to be even more conspiracy.