My personal little doomsday theory is that the entirety of the advertising industry is built on faulty data. Approximately no one has the complete data set to determine how much an ad is worth. For direct ads ("enter promo code BLAH", "Click Here to check out the new...", there's hard data. But most of the perceived value of advertising is different: The company buying the ads has zero chance of knowing if someone seeing a car ad on YouTube 6 months ago factored into their decision to purchase a different car by the same manufacturer. Maybe the advertising platform has a chance of knowing (though Google AdSense has never asked me for my sales data), but they are strongly motivated to never reveal any results that would damage their industry. The platforms that serve the ads have no reason to thoroughly vet whether ad impressions are being accurately measured because error is almost always in their favor.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.
Basically, nobody has the data because anybody who could have the data is incentivized to not look at it. That's the recipe for a rather long-lived bubble, one which if it popped (say, some short trader targeting the entirety of tech industry) would fundamentally change the tech industry. In short, I don't think making me watch a video of a truck for a couple seconds should be worth a nickel.