[torrent-of-ions]

No it's not so you will click it. They collect the data from customers and offer it to the advertisers. The data is a big part of the product they sell to advertisers: targeting advertising. They don't sell user clicks (why would anyone pay for that?), they sell targeted advertising.

[HerraBRE]

That is not how Google's business works.

Advertisers quite literally pay for clicks. That was part of how Google disrupted the market back in the day; most other advertising networks were selling "impressions", but Google was so confident in the relevance of their ads that you got impressions for free and only paid when a customer actually clicked on it.

The click is worth paying for, because it is a signal that the user has seen the ad, thought about the ad, and is interested in the ad. Advertising gold.

Obviously Google have many products (they bought Doubleclick an "impressions" company), and there are analytics value-ads and all sorts of things. But the core of their business is still pay-per-click advertising.

Your idea that advertisers are buying raw data is a misunderstanding.

[torrent-of-ions]

The "pay for click" is how they sell their product to advertisers. But advertisers do not pay for clicks. A click is worthless. They pay because they know that their adverts are being shown to the right people and there's a guarantee there in the "pay for click" thing. In order for Google to actually get those clicks, it must show them to the right people, and it does that by targeting.

Google sells targeted advertising, not clicks. Nobody pays for clicks. I do not think advertisers are buying raw data. I think they are buying advertising which is targeted based on that raw data.

[HerraBRE]

This is still a muddled view of things.

In pay-for-click, advertisers are paying for advertising which is effective. The click is how that is measured.

There are other ways to measure effectiveness, but measuring clicks is simple and reliable. No matter how you do it, advertisers ultimately want to pay for ads that work and lead to sales.

Everything else is a means to an end, targeting in particular. Ineffective advertising is a worthless waste of money, no matter how well targeted it is. Untargeted advertising which leads to sales on the other hand, is very valuable.

So sure, advertisers will prefer targeted advertising. But that's because they expect it will work better than the alternative. What matters to them is whether it works, not how.

To the general public the how is critical though. If there was less tracking and spying and data harvesting we'd all be better off. So it's very important to squash the misunderstanding that tracking and targeting itself has intrinsic value for anyone. For society (and for the ad networks), tracking has a significant cost and is in many ways a significant liability. For advertisers it's a tool in their toolbox, and if we could replace it with a more benign one, that'd be good for everyone.