Wall Street Journal (paywalled) The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app.
PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber’s advertising business, to lead the effort as senior vice president and general manager of its newly-created PayPal Ads division.
Do we all need a competitor to Alphabet/Google? I’d say yes, I don’t think Alphabet is behaving fairly.
The issue is every competitor will use the same targeted ads. No advertiser who is not using targeted ads by utilizing tracking data will never be as competitive because their ads won’t be as effective.
Until we can kill these types of advertising by making laws against it or make tools that counteract them widespread enough that it makes the business unprofitable we will continue to have our data used against us.