Yeah I mean this is the thing. The ad market is dominated by the players who have a bunch of info about users/visitors and do user-specific targeting with that

Yeah I mean this is the thing. The ad market is dominated by the players who have a bunch of info about users/visitors and do user-specific targeting with that data. My understanding is that the payment rates for "targeted" ads in the sense of "place them on this site/article because it's a relevant topic" have plummeted. Further, the extreme trackability of actual ad engagement I think has devalued the sense of value in just "your ad in front of eyeballs": I don't know that an ad you don't click on but that causes you to buy through other channels later really gets valued (though with the amount of tracking that happens maybe people are actually capturing this too). The other thing that doesn't necessarily get tracked would be "your ad is so annoying/invasive/battery-draining/spookily-targeted that it actually turns people off from buying": they're just non-converted impressions same as any other. (There's also clearly a large component of "very few people really get turned off by ads, if they noticed you even out of annoyance that's good on balance" which might be true, I don't know.) We'd have seen a shift in ad dollars regardless just owing to how much time people spend online and on mobile devices especially, but how much of the shift is driven just by the availability of the metrics? Again, the metrics are one of these things that's good for both theoretically-opposing "sides" of the ad market: the ad networks can obviously pitch them to marketing, and marketing can in turn use them to justify the ad budget.