[gyardley]

There are people who are adverse to advertising itself, and then there are people who are adverse to working for an advertising company.

I've worked for a variety of online advertising companies, and while no two companies are identical, they do deal with a lot of common problems that some people just might not be interested in implementing.

[jayruy]

isn't the base problem one of collaborative filtering? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

seems like a fairly interesting problem to me - or am i idealizing? i suppose some developers would rather work on language/framework problems than data analysis problems...