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Hi, co-author of the paper here. To answer your question, yes, there is evidence to suggest that targeted ads work better: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1600259

IMHO that's because ad targeting and ad profiles are still extremely crude. It sounds like you're talking about retargeted ads -- you look at a product and it seems to follow you around afterwards. The tech is too dumb to know you already bought it, but on average it's pretty effective.

The only website that has ever shown me novel, relevant ads was Feedly. With all my RSS feeds, they have a centralized view of my interests.