What is wrong with online ad optimization ?
Yesterday evening, I sat through a technical seminar on online ad optimization. It was a very enlightening talk, reasonably technical, that help me get started on this subject. I learnt how online ad optimization involves so systematic gathering of data, slicing and dicing, analysis based on demographic strata such as age, gender, ethnicity, wage groups, etc. They also collect data on unique visitors, and are doing real cool work like frequency capping (i.e., don’t show the high-priced ad more than a certain number of times to the user who doesn’t click on it in that many number of times - the logic being he is most likely not interested in it), and so on. After the talk, I had a few questions. The answers left much to be desired, and hence I thought of posting those questions in a...
What is wrong with Gmail ? …and why is LinkedIn going down the same path ?
Those on Gmail have my heartfelt sympathies. Additionally, if you also use LinkedIn, welcome to hell ! Let’s first talk about Gmail. Have you seen what’s happening off-late: gmail is getting painfully slower by the hour, it freezes every now and then,.. I am now seriously thinking of switching over to a ‘simple’ webmail (does anyone know any webmail without any GUI ?)..maybe back to my old Hotmail account or one of those not-so-fancy mails that don’t compromise the basic functions of a webmail over its other commercial interests, howsoever seductive they might be. When Gmail came, it wanted to create an ‘exclusive club’ of gmail users - if you were a nobody (like I was, and still am, but I was a bigger nobody back then), you just could not sign-up by yourself, unless invited by a kind...