Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
1. Targeting is rarely as sophisticated as you think. Many campaigns are run wide and cheap (all users in a region, maybe some particular hours, etc). It&#x27;s easier to optimize after this initial run based on actual performance rather than trying to figure out the exact people who would respond.<p>2. Some companies are also taking ad auction bidding in-house and running their own algorithms with their 1st party data, like upselling their own customers. This doesn&#x27;t need any relevance matching since they know exactly who they&#x27;re going after.<p>3. Targeting is not free. There is a continuum of price vs precision and high precision is rarely worth the costs, especially if the product itself cannot support those margins. Again this is why optimizing after a wide start is better than targeting upfront, and also why if you&#x27;re trying to reach a very narrow audience it&#x27;s easier to just send them email, or even direct mail.<p>4. People only notice the bad ads, not the good ones which they like or are influenced by. This is no different than complaining about bad CGI in movies when your average sitcom is 50% artificial but nobody notices because it just works.<p>5. Recommending movies as entertainment with cost in a subscription plan is nothing like finding relevant ads on the internet.<p>6. The adtech industry has 2 of the most valuable companies in the world and generates petabytes of data and billions in profit proving how well ads work. A random blog post by an outsider who has no idea how the industry works but claims it&#x27;s all broken in direct contradiction to the data just comes across the same as a flat-earth conspiracy theorist.