What targeting exists — and what deliberately does not
You target the topic, language and country of the content. Targeting people is impossible here, by design.
This is the question advertisers ask most, so here is the complete answer: you target the content your ad appears next to, never the person who sees it.
What you can set
Three axes, all of them properties of the content on screen:
- Topic — the tag of the post or debate your ad sits next to, for example `climate` or `education`.
- Language — the language that content is written in.
- Country — the country of the request, derived from the network connection. Not from a profile, and not from anything a member filled in somewhere.
Leave an axis empty and there is no restriction on that axis. All three empty means: anywhere an ad fits.
What deliberately does not exist
There is no targeting on age, gender, place of residence, interests, behaviour, purchase intent, followers, membership length, or any other property of a person. This is not a feature that has not been built yet — it cannot exist, because the database holding ads contains no reference to a viewer at all. There is nothing to target.
For the same reason there are no audiences, no lookalikes, no retargeting, and no third-party pixels or scripts on Debaty.
Why
Contextual advertising rests on the assumption that someone reading about solar panels right now is receptive to a message about solar panels. That assumption powered advertising for decades, and it still holds. What it does not require is a dossier on the reader.
See also How Debaty makes money.
The reach indication
In step 4 of the wizard you see how many topics your input matches and how many recent posts belong to them. That is an indication based on content — explicitly not an estimate of how many people you will reach. We could only make such an estimate by counting the readers we deliberately do not track.