I am always surprised by the extent to which advertising seems to rely much more on tracking instead of context. I have a bunch of different interests and hobb

I am always surprised by the extent to which advertising seems to rely much more on tracking instead of context. I have a bunch of different interests and hobbies, and a lot of the time I spend online is very easy to match to a fairly specific category - for instance, if I'm reading or watching videos about music production, advertise music software to me. If I'm reading about hikes or other outdoors type content, advertise outdoor gear to me. If I search travel destinations, advertise new suitcases to me. Instead most of these behaviors of what I do go into a big pool of data about me, and then whenever they want in the future these music software companies or outdoor gear companies or suitcase companies can choose to advertise to me, even if they weren't willing to bid above the current price at the time I viewed this content. But there's probably a fall-off in effectiveness, if you wait and advertise to me weeks later I might be less likely to convert if that thing isn't top of mind for me right then. So just anecdotally, it's not clear to me that niche businesses won't be able to exist with content-based advertising instead of tracking. A lot has changed in the past 10+ years on the internet, so it's not exactly easy to prove causality that tracking is what allows these businesses to exist today. Obviously FB knows better than anyone what works and they're upset with this change, so I'm sure advertising will take a hit, but I'm interested to see how it plays out and cautiously optimistic that it won't just kill niche businesses. Edit: another example I just thought of is the Litter Robot, a high tech cat litter box. This must be a very high margin product because they are one of the most aggressive brands I've seen tracking me online, I've happened across their site a couple of times and then I see no other ads on Youtube or other sites for many days afterwards. I honestly do plan to buy one for my cats at some point, I just haven't pulled the trigger yet. So the ads probably will convert eventually. But I don't spend that much time viewing content about cats online (watching a random cute cat video online is probably not that highly correlated with being a cat owner). This might be the perfect example of a seemingly very useful, niche business that wouldn't be able to survive without ad targeting