Non-personalized is just as effective

I completely missed this when it happend in January of this year, but it turns out that the NPO (the Dutch public broadcaster) has stopped selling targeted advertising on its web properties and has instead switched to contextual advertising. Bravo!

Now Wired reports on this change in an excellent long read that captures the NPO’s decisin making process that started with 90% of online visitors opting out of third party trackers and points to a future of online advertising that is sustainable both in terms of user privacy and economic returns for publishers:

If privacy wins out, however, and if NPO’s experience is any guide, then the future of digital publishing could be one in which a lot of money shifts back to the organizations producing the articles people want to read and the videos they want to watch. If advertisers start paying to appear in a certain context rather than to target a certain user, it will advantage publishers whose content is actually good—and put out of business the long tail of low-quality or outright fraudulent sites that currently soak up much of the money spent on automated programmatic advertising.