londrum - 6:59 pm on Sep 4, 2012 (gmt 0)

The fact still remains that if the algo shows that such IBA has a higher chance of a higher return, it will be displayed over that of an interest based ad.

IBAs might result in a quick click, but they don't help publishers all that much in the long run.

what advertisers want most of all, is traffic that converts. and the way that publishers can earn more money is to deliver that traffic. our eCPM will slowly go up, and every click we get will be worth more money.

but IBAs knock all of that on the head, because the ad has got nothing to do with the site. it's basically just blind luck. any site could have delivered that click, just by throwing the same ad in front of the same user.

if google delivers more and more IBAs, at the expense of targeted ads, then it will be that much harder for us to make our sites stand out in front of the rest. our skills in delivering targeted traffic to the advertisers won't matter so much, because the ads are no longer targeted to our site

but there's nothing we can do about it anyway, so we just have to go along with it.