05 Feb 2026 Search

I said I was going to write a Rewarded Interest fan post, so here it is. Rewarded Interest is a Google Chrome extension that does some useful stuff.

  • Automate consent preferences

  • Earn rewards

  • Get personalized ads

Personalized ads? Yes. Privacy nerds and adtech people have strong opinions about whether people prefer personalized ads to purely contextual ads, and most of those opinions are wrong. Research consistently shows that some people want personalized ads, and are willing to share personal info to get them, while other people don’t. A single satisfactory default is impossible. It’s like “Natural Scrolling” on a touchpad. Some people expect it to work one direction, some people expect it to work the other direction, and even though developers would certainly want to make it work just one way and only have to maintain one version, they have to offer a choice.

I’m a Rewarded Interest fan even though I’m not their target user. Personally, I have done enough overthinking of the issue that I now consider personalized advertising to be a risk to individuals and a blight on the economy, and I think we’d be better off on average if personalizing ads was just banned. But not everyone thinks like I do. If you post about these issues often enough there will always be some guy in the comment section who is all like, if the ads weren’t accurately personalized to me I would get maxipad adsdude, what’s the big deal? they’re like big Band-Aids™ and I really don’t want that. There is a subset of people who actually want whatever ads they get to be personalized. The challenge is how to give those people what they want while imposing as little cost and risk as possible on everybody else.

And Rewarded Interest has figured it out. Rewarded Interest enables Google Chrome users to pass an identifier called the CMAID, which is compatible with the OpenRTB industry standard. CMAID “follows you” from site to site like an old-fashioned third-party cookie, but is stable and doesn’t require “cookie syncs” and other overhead. And because Rewarded Interest is compatible with all the adtech companies already using OpenRTB, it enables web publishers to get better remuneration for the ads on their sites and doesn’t raise antitrust issues the way that personalization built into the browser does. The company even says they’ll start paying users a share of the revenue from ad campaigns that pay to use the CMAID.

Best of all, a person who doesn’t deliberately install Rewarded Interest isn’t affected, and a person who changes their mind (like if they think they’re getting higher prices along with the higher-end ads) can remove Rewarded Interest easily.

Rewarded Interest may be the first example of cross-context ad personalization that isn’t based on hiding or misrepresenting the tracking system, or badgering people into it. In a way, it’s a thing of beauty. People who want it can install it and, in effect, say, “here’s my code, scan me!” I used to ask adtech fans, if people like personalized ads so much, why are there so many privacy extensions and no extensions to make you more trackable online? And now I can stop asking that, because here it is.

One piece of customer research that doesn’t get done enough is trying to figure out if your target customers are privacy people or personalizers. As more brands figure it out, some marketers will likely decide to use Rewarded Interest as the right tool for reaching their intended audience, and some won’t. If we learned anything from the whole Google “Privacy Sandbox” saga it’s that trying to come up with one system for everyone will turn out too creepy for the privacy people and too noisy for the personalizers.

Anyway, I’m not planning to be a regular user of Rewarded Interest in my normal browser, but I will keep a Google Chrome profile with it installed. Sometimes you need a cigar bar for the the cigar aficionados and a no-smoking area for those who don’t want to put up with smoke—trying to get both groups to start vaping will make nobody happy. More: Can database marketing sell itself to the people in the database?

Update

Durham’s Rewarded Interest Puts Consumers in Control of Their Data by Michael Melton. In the near term, Rewarded Interest is focused on growing its user base to the scale needed—hundreds of thousands of users—to activate its paid rewards model. That’s what would allow consumers who opt into targeted advertising to receive a share of ad spend.