Ads

My understanding is that Matthew has used Google analytics to serve up adds. This pretty much means that beyond specifying adds to not show which is a lot of work the adds shown are selected via cookies on your pc based on google searches gmail messages etc. Ive been having a few lines of code showing on this page for a while and your post has reminded me what used to be there. Something to fix on my pc. Adblock and flashblock do block the ads but as the advertising is the only revenue the site gets its nice to just put up with the ads.

I dont think he has that much control of the ads, its like a random system that you sign up to and it assigns the ads almost randomly. although there may be a correlation with what is being discussed on the site. if you dont want to buy anythign from the ad's try an ad blocking ad in for your browser you can download them for free is you search online for them. you should be able to specify which websites you turn the ad blocker on for. i only get the "mature" dating sites... bit spooky if they've worked out my age category

Bahahaha! Its what Geeves said, so basically its a bot that works off your cookies (which if you don't know, are the things your browser picks up/leaves behind from other websites you visit) and so whatever you spend your time searching and browsing it will find among its list of advertisers and pop up into the ad window. Sooooo, Chris1 if you really are a 30 something chick, perhaps get a key logger? and wayno yea they can work out your age pretty quick (among everything else..) Just ask Matthew what he can see from our browsing on his site, our IP address (although this is never very accurate) and also what website we navigated to his FROM. Yes, among a lot of other things. You can get various different tracker/ad blockers, etc but they all only work to a certain 'level' but if you know your stuff you can be completely stealth if you want. I guess its just how much you need to be private, personally I don't care, but I don't use any social media either.

@pipeking 'personally I don't care, but I don't use any social media either'. Ditto. Good to know there's at least two of us left.

Sometimes the cookies it sees are from other pc users

"Sometimes the cookies it sees are from other pc users" Um, no, did you try that with internal affairs? haha

pc owner is responsible for everything on it. and those casino cookies are from pop ups from unrelated sites. Anyway the roadside ads are now targeted to your choise of car http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/65159027/targeted-ads-are-coming-to-australian-billboards

oh the old 'it was a pop up' excuse aye hehe :) I thought pop up blockers were standard affair with most browsers these days? I use Firefox on my mac and don't see any ads at all on here. I dunno

Have a look through your cookie list sometimes. You will be surprised whats in there. All ads show in a frame and the frame still loads and if its accompanied by a cookie the ad servers still read it as you saw it. DIA can work it out so they know if you visited that other site or not but the ad servers dont care. They just want there 0.02 cents per ad served and an extra 0.05 cents if you follow the ad Google is not a search engine or a software maker Its the biggest advertising company in the world. A rough quote from an unremembered pc magazine a while ago. " everything on the internet is for sale and every user is either a buyer or seller. If you are not selling something you are the customer"