alt Hacker NewsIt's already enough to just have plain ads. Like we have them on the streets, at the bus station, newspapers, etc. No tracking needed at all, just give out the message. If you need to target people to it in the context of the place or content you are showing it with. But you don't need to know anything about the user seeing the ad. Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.
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Depending on the data you collect, targeting by user - unfortunately - works. If the granularity is not one user, it will be a hundred. If not, a thousand, and so on. I've seen apps run ads targeting a total of 5 cohorts(together holding a hundred million users), and I've seen companies run ads targeting 100s of cohorts with the same number of users. They all work better than no targeting at all.
However what you're saying isn't completely wrong. I've also seen user targeting become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What happens is that it's championed by a high level executive as the panacea for improving revenue, implemented, and seen to not work. Now, as we all now, the C*O is Always Correct, so everything else around it is modified until the user-level targeting A/B test shows positive results. Usually this ends up in the product being tortured into an unusable mess.
> Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.
How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium.
It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?