Building systems that support millions of requests per second, that have actual real time constraints, that generate tons of data and operate in global networks

Building systems that support millions of requests per second, that have actual real time constraints, that generate tons of data and operate in global networks. That produces a lot of interesting technical challenges. AdTech absolutely works in some sense. Advertisers are fairly savvy about being able track improvements in sales of the things they are advertising and they have seen improvements using digital advertising. Does all the tracking/segmentation/attribution voodoo work? Does it make up for all the fraud and middlemen? I think those are open questions. As for a privacy aware ad tech system, I think it’s fairly trivial to do that with something like RTB/open ecosystems. The problem there is that its a low margin business and the race to the bottom doesn’t incentivize it. People operating in that space are competing with Facebook and Google who obliterate the privacy veil & dominate the landscape.