How did this banner ad know where I lived?

I went to drudgereport.com and the banner ads at the top of the page was one of those “Meet hot singles …” ads. But what caught my eye was the fact that they included “Spartanburg” in the banner ad. I’ve never been to that (the advertisers) website and I’ve never entered a city on a drudgereport.com page. Also, as you can tell from my location up there, I actually live in Simpsonville, which is about 30 minutes from Spartanburg.

My WAGs:

It read a yahoo.com cookie. I have family, friends and have worked in Spartanburg and I’ve looked at yp.yahoo.com for different things, so using the yahoo.com cookie for location. . . you get it.

or

My browser is set to auto-fill some fields in, so maybe it pulled this info from my browser somehow, like the last time I went to Mapquest I used Spartanburg as the city.

If it matters, it was a flash ad, and no, I didn’t click it. I’m a developer myself and this trick might come in handy sometime in the future!

It probably determined your location using your IP address. There are companies such as Geobytes which index the geographical locations of IPs. I’ve noticed the search form on their page won’t work on every address, but it’s often quite accurate.

That’s awesome! It returns the following information:
Country Code Country City Code City CityId Certainty Latitude Longitude Capital City TimeZone Nationality Singular Population Nationality Plural Is proxy CIA Map Reference Currency.

And it listed Spartanburg as my city. Number is number 1!