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It has been proven very effective.

Quote: "So successful, by the way, that between 2000 and 2004 with their IPO [Initial Public Offering] documents going public, the first time we got to learn exactly what the impact of this new logic was. And the impact was a revenue increase of 3,590%, just during those years 2000-2004."

source: https://www.econtalk.org/shoshana-zuboff-on-surveillance-cap...

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That's comparing tracking advertising with bad data to tracking advertising with good data. Where's the comparison of tracking to non tracking advertising?

Tracking advertising costs the advertiser more (and makes the ad provider a lot more), but there's little evidence to suggest it's significantly more effective than content advertising. And this isn't even accounting for the enormous social cost of private surveillance.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy/

The way we use internet has also been changing at a significant rate since 2000 so we don't really have the counterfactual to show that content-based advertising wouldn't have experienced similar growth rates, unless we find a report covering revenue growth over the same period from a company (or better yet, a set of companies) that focuses on content-based ads

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