Tempting Ad's... Do they belong?

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  • librarygoddess2
    librarygoddess2 Posts: 145 Member
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    From what I understand, MFP has nothing to do with the displayed ads. It is based on your browsing history. I have never seen any food ads on mine, but I do often see Carnival ads. I did a lot of searches for my upcoming trip.

    The above is what I was going to say.
    Except I never do any of that. Why am I getting cinnabun, burgers, etc? Oh, and cruises. I think they are targeting PROFILE information, and making their evil educated guesses on what a person of my sex, age, and location might like? EVIL.

    Thanks to cookies (recall your Internet chapter) advertisers can follow our clicktrail and slice & dice our data to serve up ads targeted at us by what we’ve searched for, where we live, our social sharing, our emails! and increasingly our matched realworld data.

    One thing you can try is to delete all your cookies and start fresh. If you have your cookies blocked then this could actually be why it's targeting you with this. MFP as quoted above actually doesn't choose what to give you. In order to keep the service free they will get money from an advertising company that will select the ads to give to you. If you have your cookies blocked or disabled then the only way the advertiser can decide what to give you is by classifying the site you are currently on. Because the site will likely be listed under "food" in there main directory the logical ads to push to you are food related. (of course this is only an educated guess as I don't know the settings on your computer or the contract that MFP has with it's advertisers. However, I do know that I never get food advertised but I do get a lot of diet and exercise stuff advertised to me because I search for that type of thing a lot.)

    Cheers and hope that helps.
  • IvoryParchment
    IvoryParchment Posts: 651 Member
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    Before you delete your cookies, remember that they are what keep you logged in when you move from page to page on a website, and what keeps track of what is in your "shopping cart" until you check out. That information is stored on your computer, not the server hosting the website, and cookies are how the information is relayed back to the website.

    You may want to block 3rd party cookies, so visiting one site doesn't give information about you to all their advertisers.

    As far as the food ads, it's probably also a question of what the text on the website says. There are lots of mentions of food on MFP, and the advertising bots probably can't distinguish a diet site from a cooking site.

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