What consumers mostly want out of advertising is no advertising. If that's not available, then targeted advertising is the next best thing. Targeted advertising is, as Mark says, if you happen to ski and you see ads on skiing, presumably that's a more welcoming experience than seeing ads on diapers, if that's not what you do.
Most of our experience—I will talk now as an online person. The experience of watching television is largely one of irrelevant advertising. We have been sitting through ads and asking, “How did I sign up to be targeted with this ad? This doesn't make any sense to me.” Online, it's an extremely measurable media. So what advertisers do is they literally pay more for an ad to a relevant person. It is done through exchanges. I can list names of them, but they are much like the New York Stock Exchange. An impression goes up and everybody bids on that impression in microseconds. If somebody says, “That guy has been skiing and I want to sell ski equipment”, they will pay more. They may $2.50 CPM—cost per thousand impressions—rather than the 25¢ CPM. As you have had people testify to you, that's a more efficient market. That ski advertiser wants to reach somebody who is skiing, so they will pay for that data.
How they get that data is an interesting question. Typically, in the U.S., many publishers will sell them that data. They will say in the privacy policy that they are going to sell data. I may not be up-to-date with which sites, so I won't name the sites, but in the U.S. there are many car sites—places where you go to buy or price a car or that sort of stuff. They will sell their data to the big data brokers—Blue Kai Inc. and eXelate are both leaders in this in the U.S. The data guys will in turn sell it to the exchanges, so that when you buy an impression on a large site—Yahoo!, Microsoft, or whatever it is—you will pay a very low CPM if it's not targeted and a little more if there is some data behind it.
That's a very efficient marketplace. I mentioned that it's not as well developed in Canada because the scale is smaller. It seems like a lot of people to us; it's just not a lot in some of these larger countries. So the scale is smaller.
The other thing is that the publishers, by and large, don't sell their data as freely. I don't think that's a privacy law thing. I think to some degree it's an evolutionary thing, but they simply don't sell that data as freely.
If you are trying to target auto intenders—it's a term in our industry for somebody who is about to buy an auto—it's a lot easier in the U.S. than it is in Canada. There aren't as many sites that have auto data that will sell it.
To your point, is it scary, is it efficient—that's beyond me to say. It does make the advertising a lot more efficient if you are trying to serve up an ad to somebody who is relevant.
In terms of Nexopia's own business, it's just not at a scale where that is an interesting proposition. We have about 200,000 members. Let's say they are about half male and half female. If you want to target a young Canadian, particularly right now one who lives in the west coast—Alberta and B.C. as the primary audience—Nexopia is a great place to do it. But once you start cutting it down to people who live in Edmonton, people who are women, people who are a certain age, you're not going to have a lot of advertisers. You're only going to reach 10,000 people.
So that business works a lot better if you are a very large company. You guys all know the names of large companies.
Does that cover all or some of it?