Targeted Advertising

Our world today runs on advertisements. Physical space is filled with billboards of all shapes and sizes. Newspapers and magazines devote an enormous amount of space to them. Ads support our watching of television and the internet-based equivalents. And, of course, many webpages delight in covering themselves in advertisements, hoping to collect a bounty for enticing visitors to click an ad.

With the rise of readily available computing power, advertisers find themselves more and more anxious to ensure that their ads are reaching the right people at the right time. Profiles of every web visitor are compiled. The content of every page is scanned to determine its topic. Computers behind the scenes are constantly computing which ad is best suited to the current situation. And sometimes they make a perfect match: