I always found it interesting how every business that used to sell a product based on demonstratable customer value and quality user experiences wants to instea

I always found it interesting how every business that used to sell a product based on demonstratable customer value and quality user experiences wants to instead cling to the ad industry. Whether or not there's a little more money to be had there now is somewhat irrelevant. The bigger deal is that advertising is a hyper-fickle industry, very much subject to tossing out babies, bathwater, bathtubs, and entire metropolitan water infrastructures in a single fell swoop. There's a clear and identifiable risk factor here. Somewhere, at the end of the line, there's someone actually writing checks for to ad service providers, who's going to ask "We're spending (collectively) 829 kazillion dollars to feed these adtech gigaunicorns, basically out of FOMO that we had to be more data-driven than our competitiors. Did this actually move $829 kazillion more Pepsi than just running a 30-second TV spot with a hot boy band would have?" When the bubble bursts, how many otherwise viable products are going to implode because they've become too financially dependent on ad/data sales, or have become so eroded by the compromises for ads that they won't be able to recover their reputation after the adpocalypse?