[shostack]

Found the industry person.

Fully agree with this. Data leakage is also a real thing in RTB given the nature of the bid response if a pub wants any sort of decent CPMs/fill.

Bringing this all 1st party and essentially creating their own walled data garden boosts the value of the exclusive 1st party data for some presumably valuable audience segments, arms their direct and PMP sales efforts with even more exclusivity, and prepares them for the post-cookie world once the Chrome update hits, which only really works for publishers that can get high %'s of logged-in users to match to audience segments and build their models around.

This also handily lets them reduce/eliminate privacy legislation risk since presumably subscribers need to consent to all of this collection and usage for the service (nuances of how "ok" that is in the eyes of the various privacy bodies not withstanding).