The writing
Every essay, freshest wounds first
One beat, covered properly: how online advertising actually works — the auctions, the profiles, the money — written to be read, not skimmed. All essay pages are ad-free; the landing page carries the site's only ads.
Why am I seeing this ad?
A field guide to the dashboards where Google and Meta keep their opinions of you — and what the off switches actually switch off.
The 100-millisecond auction
Anatomy of a single ad impression, from the first byte of HTML to a cleared trade — all before the page finishes painting.
The $25,000 second
How a shelf of trillion-dollar forecasts becomes the per-second counter on our homepage — the arithmetic, the caveats, and a standing promise to correct it.
The ads that follow you
One idle look at a pair of boots, and three weeks of machinery swings into motion — how retargeting works, why it won’t stop, and how it takes credit for a purchase you’d have made anyway.
In-market for a funeral
The targeting machine is wrong-but-confident by default — and when its confidence lands on grief, the person on the receiving end pays for the error.
Made for advertising
Inside the arbitrage economy of pages built to host ads rather than be read — and why this ad-funded blog owes you a straight answer about the difference.
Do ad blockers break the deal?
The content-for-attention bargain was never signed by the reader — so who broke it first, and what would honouring it even look like?
How this site makes money
Four ad tiles on one page fund everything here; these are the published commitments that keep that arrangement honest.