A collection of tweets on a working paper & WSJ article on advertisements that are behaviorally targeted. From the paper:
Behavioral advertising, for example, is the practice of monitoring people’s online behaviors (websites visited, articles read, videos watched) and using the collected information to show people individually targeted advertisements (…)
the behavioral targeting capabilities of programmatic advertising are heavily tied to the availability of tracking cookies (…)
We exploit the presence or absence of cookies to estimate how limits to the ability to engage in behavioral advertising affects publishers’ revenues.
Abstract
While the impact of targeted advertising on advertisers’ campaign effectiveness
has been vastly documented, much less is known about the value generated by online tracking and targeting technologies for publishers – the websites that sell ad spaces. In fact, the conventional wisdom that publishers benefit too from behaviorally targeted advertising has rarely been scrutinized in academic studies. We investigate how the (un)availability of users’ cookies, which affects the ability of advertisers to perform behavioral targeting, impacts publishers’ revenues. We leverage a rich dataset of millions of advertising transactions completed across multiple websites owned by a large media company. We implement an augmented version of the inverse probability weighting, a double-robust estimator that allows us to estimate effects even in the presence of potential confounding. We find that when a user’s cookie is available publisher’s revenue increases by only about 4%. This corresponds to an average increase of $0.00008 per advertisement. The results contribute to the current debate over online behavioral advertising, and how benefits accrued from tracking and targeting online consumers may be differentially allocated to various stakeholders in the advertising ecosystem.
Quotes from the paper:
“The American Prospect claimed that “an online advertisement without a third-party cookie sells for just 2 percent of the cost of the same ad with the cookie.””
“many studies seem to concur that targeted advertising is beneficial and effective for advertising firms”
The estimated potential outcome mean for transactions without cookies is $0.93, while the potential outcome mean for transactions with cookies is $1.02, a statistically significant difference. We run the model using a logarithmic transformation of the variable, and the results suggest that when a cookie is available, publisher’s revenue increases by about 4%.
{I don’t understand how a difference of $0.09 can be 4%}
“Important to clarify, our result can be interpreted as the value generated for publishers by the presence of a cookie, but cannot be interpreted as the value generated by behavioral advertising, even though there is a clear correlation between the two. ”
Nice longer summary thread
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1134156387129233408
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1134162526835339264
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1134170923529957376
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1134178190472040448
https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1134178609369763840
Nederlands
Related stuff
Quote from paper’s author Alessandro Acquisti:
“How is it possible that for merchants the cost of targeting ads is so much higher whereas for publishers the return on increased revenues for targeted ads is just 4%,” he wondered, posing a question that publishers should really be asking themselves — given, in this example, they’re the ones doing the dirty work of snooping on (and selling out) their readers.
wilte 
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