When you pick up a newspaper, the advertisement was already sold. When you look at a website with an online advertiser such as Google, the advertisement is _no

When you pick up a newspaper, the advertisement was already sold. When you look at a website with an online advertiser such as Google, the advertisement is _not_ already sold. Your information is put on a marketplace to set a price for your attention and device's resources. There's a very significant asymmetry to what is being sold when comparing the two scenarios.