You watch videos on YouTube and you frequently get a short ad before the video.
For some reason, I’ve been getting several ads lately that are in Spanish. Are these ads targeted at viewers based on the videos you watch or are they pretty much random? As far as I recall, I haven’t watched any Spanish videos in the recent past so I’m wondering if other people have been seeing these ads.
I get a lot of text ads in Spanish, but I live in Texas and I just thought it was a regional thing with my ISP. But I don’t speak Spanish, and I don’t visit websites in Spanish or anything like that.
I sometimes get ads in French, but then I live in Canada. Strangely, they don’t seem to be tied to what I’m actually watching on YouTube, but I wonder whether what I’ve been searching for previously has an effect on ad choices? For example, about a month ago, I’d been searching for online shopping-cart systems, and looked at one such system called Volusion, and then for a while I was getting ads for Volusion on YouTube, and also on other websites.
On the old MSN Messenger all of the ads I got were in Spanish. My language preference on my linked Hotmail account has always been English and my location is English speaking.
But 99% of the my use of Messenger was text chatting in Spanish with Mrs Iggy. That makes me think they are analyzing the content of our messages to determine what ads to show. A bit creepy, IMHO.