Ok, so. Earlier today I was watching the Technology Connections video about how Power is energy over time. In the video he shows a picture of an Anker Solix powerbank to illustrate the concept of energy storage. I’ve never seen or heard of this product before.
An hour later I’m reading an article on Lemmy, and there is an ad for that same powerbank.
What explains this? Some explanations I can think of:
- Random chance.
- Google scans YouTube videos for information about what products appear in them, and knows that I watched the video, and that I’m the same person now reading the article. It then gives this information to everyone in the ad-selling marketplace, so the Anker ad company can bid high to show me an ad.
- Google is observing what appears on my screen in order to sell this info to advertisers.
I think 2 is most likely given Occam’s Razor, but I didn’t think Google scanned yt videos like this.
Is there something I’m missing?
I was watching on an Android phone, on Tubular. My browser is IronFox. I’m surprised that Google can follow my activity from one app to the other… this is probably based on IP address, but I wonder what other device fingerprinting tubular and IronFox expose…
There’s a fourth Option.
It could be a new marketing strategy. Post and push a video on Lemmy that involves a power bank, and advertise said power bank also on Lemmy.
It’s a bit of an odd Video anyways to make it to the front of Lemmy, especially considering that long videos usually never make it to the front.
Neither the video, nor the ad were on Lemmy. The ad was an automated ad on a random article I found on Lemmy. The kind where behind the scenes, the ad vendor auctions off the space and your information to the bot that’s the highest bidder