Advertisements

Following my recent addition of the New York Times to my personal news feed, I have noticed that their advertisements are not the same as those that come with the Financial Times. So my NYT feed is presently dominated by the advertisement snapped above, or slight variations thereon. Hopefully the young lady concerned has made lots of money out of it. A bit of variety is provided by rather smaller but rather leggier advertisements from Valentino Garavani, whoever they might be.

While the FT seems to plump for advertisement of the day, with today's being from an outfit called 'capital.com', livened up a bit with some smaller advertisements from Google. On other days it is luxury goods, often Bulgari, bearing fruit to the extent of getting us to Sloane Square, as noticed at reference 1.

Sometimes there are enough of them to be irritating, particularly in the case of FT, for which I pay a serious subscription.

That apart, I am making little progress with working out how the advertisement display algorithms work at either place. Sometimes they kick in, sometimes they don't. Sometimes there is lots of white space which looks as if it was intended for advertisements which are not there. Is the algorithm personalised in the way that both Bing and Google personalise their advertisement feeds?

I might add that while I had some modest dealings with Dell in my days at the Home Office when we were buying some of their servers, maybe fifteen years or more ago now, I have never owned a Dell PC or even seriously considered buying one, with all my recent purchases being HP for some reason or other, from bricks-and-mortar shops rather than clicks. So I don't think that the advertisement snapped above, directed at office rather than home computing, is personalised.

PS: Friday morning: capital.com were still there in the Financial Times yesterday, but this morning they have been largely pushed out by Bain, a big management consultancy. With a strong initial showing by Google Workspace having faded. A bit cynical this morning, with my getting a strong association between management consultants and invasive parasites. Symbiosis does not get the tone right at all. While Dell are still there for the NYT. They must indeed work on a different cycle, on a different algorithm.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/bulgari.html.