Great point! Yes! And this is how (most) of traditional podcast ads work as well. You know, the ads that actually guide you to interesting products. One thing

Great point! Yes! And this is how (most) of traditional podcast ads work as well. You know, the ads that actually guide you to interesting products. One thing to note, though, is that tracking is also used by the bean counters. Pre internet (newspapers, billboards, tv) accountability was always answered by: "trust us" or coarse-grained estimates. Individual user tracking promises a transparent way to separate checks from balances. Evidently, this is a bit of a false promise in practice. And that is why there's this cat and mouse game where advertisers are tracking "genuine user agents" and sifting out the robots. While I'm sure the advertising eco system is nothing but lies, damn lies and statistics it seems that in terms of click-trough and conversion user targeting is more profitable than content targeting. ...That being a common belief, I suppose we're left with simply prohibiting user tracking altogether, or making it prohibitively expensive. GDPR, ad and cookie blockers are stones thrown into the pond of the latter.