True, but being old and slow telco businesses they totally failed to monetize it.

Verizon bought AOl, HuffPost, Techcrunch and plenty of other media to build an advertising giant by pairing data with sites audience -- and took 4.6 BILLION WRITEDOWN on the whole venture [1] because failed to make it work.

[1] https://www.recode.net/2018/12/11/18136127/verizon-aol-yahoo...

EDIT: oh and AT&T will learn the same lesson with their recent 800M AppNexus aquisition. Just give it time.