Not entirely related, but I remember thinking when Hulu was talking about an ad-free version of their streaming library that “this will clearly cost a lot more per month because my eyeballs are worth A LOT!!”

Imagine my surprise when it turned out only being $4 a month to remove commercials. It almost hurts my feelings knowing how little I’m worth to advertisers...

Paying to have commercials removed may not imply that your activity is not spied on, then the corresponding data not sold to third parties. You "locally" (on the site you paid) escape from advertising, indeed, but for the rest...

It's not only about allowing customers to pay for their share of ad revenue in order to remove it the ads. But to also enter new markets of customers.

For example I would never subscribe to a service with ads, regardless of price. The Hulu tier that includes ads would have to pay me about $30/mo before I would consider switching from the ad free tier.

The number might be unrelated to ad revenue at all and they figured that was the perfect threshold between capturing the highest number of "cheaper" subscribers while also maximizing new ad-free subscribers.

But it was 50% higher... that’s indeed a lot.

But "a lot" can still be insignificant. Imagine an ant falling from 1 meter, it would live, but would have fallen thousands of times its own height.

The data of one user is worthless AFAIK, only aggregation gives any usable stats.

Then why do ad networks spend so much time, energy, and money to track individuals?

How is this even a question? One persons data is useless. They don’t care what you’re watching specifically, they care what everybody in a region is watching. They have to track individuals to get the profile data to categorize them in the first place.