I think there's been a decade or more or irrational fixation on data-driven advertising at this point. The market is convinced building these huge treasuries o

I think there's been a decade or more or irrational fixation on data-driven advertising at this point. The market is convinced building these huge treasuries of consumer data, at any expense in cost and creepiness, will result in wildly better advertising performance. We've given Google and Facebook 12-digit valuations on that principle. But advertising is a 80/80 problem: You can get to 80% of potential results easily, and spend 80% of your money, effort, and goodwill chasing the rest. Content-based ads (think the early era of Google AdSense when the ads would be text or fall back to PSAs) sell pretty well, considering you didn't need an exabyte of profile data to build them. Eventually, fundamentals have to come into play-- these companies need the revenue numbers to justify the valuation-- and the only way to get there is to charge premium prices for their advertising services. At that point, the music stops, when advertisers realize the cost-per-acquisition is poor compared to much cheaper, more scattershot technology, or even just earlier stops on the targeting continuum.