Attention economy.
Forums with huge memberships and a LOT of views are BIG business.
Yeah....it's probably about targeted advertising and identified tracking. It's actually really hard to prevent that kind of thing these days...ad blockers don't do all of it, VPNs can't block everything, etc..
The simplest side of it is that gear companies know they can advertise on hobby-specific forums and know they're going to get better click-throughs and purchases than advertising randomly. And it just gets more interesting/complex from there.
Most of that is what I manage to block of the things I mentioned. I'm sure there's more that gets through.
The funny thing is that the vast majority of people seem to
like this new kind of advertising.
You probably don't get as much "obvious" spam as you did 25 years ago, and apparently people actually prefer that. A lot of people claim they don't, but the metrics say otherwise, most of the time.
6 million a year seems high just for what I see being blocked.
I'm pretty sure that means they're doing things to try to uniquely identify visitors, correlate that with external data sources, and then selling that as actual high-value data....which, AFAIK, actually bypasses anything they have written in their privacy policy as well as most CCPA and GDPR restrictions because they're not actually selling the information users give them, they're selling things they collect passively and automatically that doesn't actually require the users to submit anything or even register for an account.
That kind of thing....is insanely common. It's more common on BS "let's all just use an RSS feed to repost the same stories" blogs and social media.
SM is really bad about it. They typically call them "shadow profiles". Facebook, for example, knows who you are and has a lot of information on you even if you've never signed up for an account. The simplest way it starts is that someone who has you in their phone signs up for an account and then gives FB access to their contacts to search for friends on the network. They obviously do that search, but they also store identifiers and information about the real-life social networks of people who haven't signed up yet just in case they ever do.....and so they can use and sell information about people who aren't their users, haven't agreed to and aren't bound by ToS/privacy, and haven't requested exclusion via CCPA/GDPR.
It's actually really freaky if you get to the point that you peek under the hood of all this stuff.
I'm just happy that, at present, the whole "corporate spying" world seems to be focused on selling me things that I'm at least vaguely interested in rather than anything seriously nefarious.
