Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, education, employers, and places you’ve lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more for.So despite comScore showing that the average Google+ user only spends 3 minutes per month on Google+, VP Bradley Horowitz wasn’t lying when he told the Wall Street J...

More and more I see articles popping up that bash social networks for "violating" our privacy and selling our information to advertisers. Inevitably, Facebook has been at the center of many of these "scandals". Today on HN I came across this interviewwith Disconnect co-founder Casey Oppenheim and I just don't get it.In it, he bashes Facebook (and other online advertisers) for using our information in order to serve up targeted ads. He points out that many of the " “free” services aren’t really free — we pay with our data". At one point he even says that "Facebook...

Usually if you see on your website a white/blank space instead of Adsense ads, this means that Adsense cannot show adds in that unit for some reasons (we are going to talk about possible reasons below) and also you have enabled the “Fill space with a solid color” feature (in the “Choose what to display if no relevant ads are available” settings of this ad unit). I probably should also say that if you set “Show public service ads” instead of the “Fill space with a solid color” one, the PSA will be shown instead of a blank space.If you notice no us...