Ultimately I'm not sure there is an end goal, except figuring out reasons to extract more money out of VC's. Buying consumer data to confirm your biases is probably a good one.
If ads are cheap and margins for your product are high, you don't care if your ad bounces off of 1,000 people as long as it turns 1 into a paying customer.
It may be very targeted compared to traditional television and radio advertising.
Yet it could still be less targeted than ideal.
Let's say my ad was profitable via traditional radio and television advertising.
If only 1% of viewers were in my target audience for traditional television and radio advertising, and Roku can get that number to 2%, they've just doubled my roi.
Targeted doesn't mean perfect, it just means better.
I used to be a heavy Facebook user though and in spite of them having loads of data about me and my interests, the ads were crap.
Yes, it's a shame that other people have different preferences from me sometimes, so that the market for what I want is smaller. But, hey, variety is the spice of life.
You can get pretty far with ad-blockers.
I never have that; it’s always irrelevant stuff OR stuff I just bought (because the ad tracking know I was on that other site looking at that product; somehow they don’t know I bought it so now I get weeks of a product I no longer want to buy aka fully useless) so will definitely not buy again.
Of course with a master of science in computer science, after years and years of posting links to my open source projects; what I need the most is a programming course or a no code platform.