It is my belief that adtech companies' top priority is to make money. They do this by increasing clickthrough rate and cost per click. As long as they don't f

It is my belief that adtech companies' top priority is to make money. They do this by increasing clickthrough rate and cost per click. As long as they don't fall below some "trust" threshold (subjective emotional judgement from ill-informed customers pulling threads from obfuscated-at-best PR releases), they are golden. From that perspective, why would they want to "better" target using proxy metrics for the ones you really care about? Focusing on the CTR[0], why use tags or interests when you can use clickthrough rate itself? There are so many factors in what causes someone to click; it's a more effective strategy to treat all those factors as a black box, and optimize for the direct behavior you want to encourage. Added bonus, those black box / supercomplex problems can be efficiently optimized by ML. [0] CPC is driven by the advertiser side