How does online tracking and advertising work?

• Popping the publishing bubble: A great overview about what the iOS 9 ad blockers mean for online advertising (Stratechery)
• Data collection by loyalty programs (Choice)
• How supermarkets get your data & what they do with it (The Guardian)
• Online tracking systems, how do they work (NewFangled)
• Tracking the trackers: What are cookies? An introduction to web tracking (The Guardian)
• Online tracking: If they are watching, should you watch too? (NewFangled)
• A large tracking investigation (The Wall Street Journal)
• Don't track us (Duck Duck Go)
• I'm being followed: How Google, & 104 other companies, are tracking me on the web (The Atlantic)
• Facebook isn't free - it has made you its product (Computerworld)
• The decline of newspapers (Wikipedia)
• The Age
• The Herald Sun
• Newspaper Death Watch
• The future of print: Newspapers struggle to survive in the age of technology (Harvard Political Review)
• Newspapers' ongoing search for subscription revenue: From paywalls to micropayments (The Conversation)
• The data are in: Newspapers aren’t going to get enough digital subscribers (Mumbrella)
• Apple Pay
• PayPal
• Elon Musk & PayPal (Wikipedia)
• Are micropayments a viable way to support the news business? (The Conversation)
• LaterPay, a German payment infrastructure company, offers micropayments with a twist (NiemanLab)
• Is downloading really stealing? The ethics of digital piracy (The Conversation)
• Stranger Things (NetFlix)
• Here's how much Apple Music is going to pay artists (Business Insider, Australia)
• Real-time bidding: What the bots run around doing behind the scenes before an ad appears on your screen (Wikipedia)
• Behavioural networks: A quick summary of what happens from cookie collection to the ads you see (Mike On Ads)
• An explanation of cookie matching & real-time bidding (Mike on Ads)
• "An ad exchange is a technology platform that facilitates the buying & selling of media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks" (Wikipedia)
• What is an ad exchange (Marketing Land)
• A discussion about typical cuts made during bidding in online ad exchanges (Quora)
• The DoubleClick ad exchange (Google)
• The Like button (Wikipedia)
• Likejacking: A form of 'clickjacking' where someone hijacks your Likes (Wikipedia)
• Court rules against the use of Facebook's Like button: Shopping site accused of violating German privacy laws (DailyMail, Australia)
• How to stop Facebook from tracking you (Business Insider, Australia)
• Is every browser unique? Results fom the Panopticlick experiment (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Panopticlick: Test your browser's ability to protect you from online tracking...Lucy failed badly (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Wall Street (Wikipedia)
• Pauline Hanson (Wikipedia)
• Safari's ad blocker: "Blocks all annoying ads & supports websites by not blocking unobtrusive ads by default" (Apple)
• A discussion about why we keep seeing targeted ads after we've bought the thing (Quora)
• Targeted ads after I buy something are really annoying (Brad Ideas)
• Loyalty cards help build a profile on you: The store nerds who know everything about you (news.com.au)
• The Woolworths 'rewards' loyalty card (Woolworths)
• Hmm...interesting: The Commonwealth Bank now has a 'loyalty app' where you can conveniently store all your loyalty cards in the one place...close to your bank account details (CommBank)
• How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did (Forbes)
• What is big data? (Forbes)
• 20 facts about big data (Forbes)
• How big data can be useful for businesses (Business.com)
• Why big data is a big deal (Harvard Magazine)
• An example of an Australian data company (Quantium)
• An example of an American data company (Ghostery)
• Kim Dot Com
• Proximity marketing: "The localised wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place"...very 'Minority Report' (Wikipedia)
• Is your smartphone broadcasting your movements when you shop? (Naked Security)
• Convenience or security: You can't have both when it comes to Wi-Fi (TechRepublic)
• At Starbucks, data pours in. But what to do with it? (Advertising Age)
• Is Wi-Fi at Starbucks safe? (Forbes)
• The search engine that doesn't track you (Duck Duck Go)
• Google Maps has been tracking your every move: Google works better because it tracks you...creepy but handy (Junkee)
• Tom Hanks (Wikipedia)
• The most expensive Google AdWords keywords in the US are 'San Antonio car wreck attorney', for USD$670.44 (Quartz)
• The most expensive Google AdWords keywords in Australia include 'Life insurance co.', for AUD$150.30 (The Website Marketing Group)
• The 100 most expensive keywords on Google: Infographic (webpagefx)
• Google has its own ad exchange: Google DoubleClick AdX (Google)
• Google AdWords charges on a pay-per-click basis (Word Stream)
• We use Blubrry to vaguely track our listenership, but it tells us very little (Blubrry)
• Gold 104.3 FM: Play Africa by Toto goddammit! (Gold 104.3)
• Minority Report (Wikipedia)
• Philip K. Dick (Wikipedia)
• Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia

Corrections

• Not really sure if highly targeted ads cost more per click...this post from Facebook suggests the more 'relevant' you make your ad to your target audience, the cheaper it will be (Facebook Business)
• Further to above: How much do I have to pay on Facebook? (Qwaya)
• Further further to above: 6 factors that drive up the cost of your Facebook ad conversions (AdEspresso)