There's a growing base of evidence in both the US and the Netherlands (from news media websites, I believe), that targeted advertising is effectively a bubble,

There's a growing base of evidence in both the US and the Netherlands (from news media websites, I believe), that targeted advertising is effectively a bubble, and didn't yield higher metrics or revenues. In fact I believe in a couple of examples, they saw higher growth and revenues from ads by going totally non-targeted. There's an entire sector now focused on trying to hyper-target ads, on the presumed basis they're more effective. If the house of cards falls down, and people realise untargeted ads perform better without all that extra cost, things could get interesting. Unfortunately it isn't as simple as that, as "independent" audience measurement seems to still be a requirement that leads to adtech type solutions emerging. To go back to your observation about the quality of targeting though, this shows in a way that it simply doesn't work... The trouble is advertisers continue to throw money at the services falsely claiming to have these accurate data-driven targeting models, without seemingly ever thinking to cross-validate them to be sure they aren't absolute nonsense of false claims of targeting demographics - your ones having entirely the opposite of Boolean demographics show how wild it can be. I fetched my data from Spotify and the limited data they had (in theory objective data) was chronically wrong - they had tried to put me into a group based on phone network used, but it didn't even get that right, despite that being trivial to do(!)