If I click the button to explain the ad, it tells me it's because of my age (I'm a young man) and time of day (I watch videos in the late evening.)
Which is certainly a profile that makes sense, in broad strokes. But no, these are not my interests.
(No judgement to people who like playing pornographic games and dating online! It's just rather inconvenient when I'm trying to watch YouTube videos with my family!)
There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to square one.
It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to twenty something with a smattering of mortgage offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a decision on which avenues to go down in order to further specialize.
I actually messed around with it once to figure out what it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really change their estimate of my age (or they just think that every male on the internet is into 20 somethings). They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made travel reservations.
Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense that Google would likely respond "You're using our service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it.
They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates with a mental Tink Tink as the great data hoarding monolith known as Google does it's damnedest to sell me something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the process.
And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes in the statistical voyeurism sense too!
This would be the single most impactful way to return the Net to a repository of valuable information.
Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in.
But how will websites stay up without advertising, you might ask?
I don't care. I host things I want out there. I find a way to account for it. If you want to present me first party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I'm okay with that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue maximization techniques.
