Saying that though, it does seem like as soon as I click one advert (either out of curiosity, or to waste obvious scam advertisers budget), I'm suddenly inundated with similar adverts.
Worse I've clicked an ad, bought a product and still seen adverts for the same product from the vendor after the fact. I'm pretty sure there are ways for vendors to preclude such wasteful ad spend.
Also, it's not like the platform is going to give advertisers access to its full capabilities. For one, they don't need to - they only need to sell the minimum it takes to keep the advertisers on board. Two, they wouldn't want some clever advertisers to extract juicy data indirectly and cut out the middleman.
Better capabilities for customers, they reach more customers, more revenue = they may increase ad spending because they see it working
What am I missing here? Don't you still need the platform to actually advertise on? How could I extract data and use that to advertise to someone?
Not reliably so, and not people who are deliberately trying to fake the system.
Looking at the ads FB are showing me, they are not well targetted at all. I can see an add about AI in education that seems to be aimed at teachers (not a teacher), one from a charity aimed at people with spare rooms that could be used to accommodate human trafficking survivors (I do not have a spare room), a summer school for kids who might do a history related subject at university (that one is well targetted), one advertising admin jobs at British intelligence agencies (I only just meet security requirements and I do not have relevant experience). I get shown multiple ads aimed at Muslims (I am not a Muslim). In the past I have been shown ads for Judaism GCSE courses (not Jewish either, and my kids did not do any religion GCSEs).