Are intrusive ads really necessary to secure financial support for free-to-play sites? A recent academic study suggests that they are not.
Advertising rooted in “behavioral targeting ,” which collects data on consumers’ online behavior in order to deliver personalized ads (usually with the help of cookies), has been dominating the digital advertising industry for several years now.
However, it seems that the omnipresent “behavioral targeting” is actually having belize phone number little impact on publishers ’ revenues . This is at least the conclusion of a study carried out by the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Irvine and Carnegie Mellon University.
The report suggests that for ads equipped with cookies, publishers earn only 4% more revenue per ad impression than average.
To conduct the study, its authors tracked millions of advertising transactions at a major U.S. media company over the course of a week, The Wall Street Journal reports .