Most of these offerings are completely free to you. In order to provide such great content and services free of charge, we display advertisements. The better we are able to provide venues for our sponsors and other advertising partners to reach specific demographic segments of our user base, the more advertising revenue we earn. The more revenue we earn, the better we are able to provide you with new and exciting content and services. With more content and services we will attract more users.
More users means more venues for advertising.
And so on. In general, advertisers do not want to know about you specifically. What advertisers want is the chance to appeal to large groups of users who share certain demographic characteristics, such as gender and age. If we did not collect this data, we would not be able to provide the most effective forum for our sponsors to advertise in, nor would we be able to measure which promotions work. We also use the aggregate data internally to perform statistical analyses of the collective characteristics and behavior of our registered users and visitors, to measure user demographics and interests regarding specific areas within the site and to determine and analyze how and where best to use our resources.