[davemel37]

What really bothers me about articles like this is the complete lack of understanding of what advertising actually is.

All Advertising is arbitrage, exploiting a market inefficiency between the cost to reach an eyeball and the value of that eyeball.

Whats the difference between a high speed trader and a mortgage broker advertising? Whats the difference betweem a retailer advertising to sell a product they bought wholesale and a high frequency trader reselling an impression in real time?

Im not saying we are not all better served by closing this information gap and finding market efficiency, but lets not pretend that this is any more unscrupulous than any other business that exploits information asymmetry...and its definitely not the same as high frequency traders...especially because these ad buyer may never have gotten the impression if the arbitrager didnt bring it to a different exchange or support it with a different data set.