State of online ad inventory

Three old Jewish friends are sitting around the park, feeding the pigeons and lamenting over how tough things are. "Oy vey," says the one. "Things are so tough in the garment business these days. We have to discount everything by 50 percent. Can you imagine that? Two for the price of one? It's ridiculous!"

"You think that's bad," says the second one. "The watch business is so crazy right now, we literally give away our watches at cost in order to break even."

The third one interjects: "You lucky, lucky bastards. The jewellery business is so bad right now; we give away diamonds for free and throw in $1,000 per transaction in the process!"

The other two look puzzled and say, "How on Earth do you make any money?"

"Don't worry," says the third, "we make it up on volume."

This is an ode to all the publishers out there who have original content but still choose to do business by competing with content aggregators who mooch original content and deploy better content finding strategies and rank better than the ones with the original content. Whats more pitiful - original content owners don't care to provide quality metrics such as the engagement of readers, neither care to measure it nor do much to deploy any content finding strategies.

Decision making without data (gambling)

Decision making without any base data (not 100% of decisions should be taken based on the data - that would turn us into droids) is just like gambling.

George Washington said about gambling and can also apply to decisions made with gut feeling in today's age: "Gambling is child of avarice, the brother of iniquity and the father of mischief. This is a vice which is productive of every possible evil... in a word, few gain by this abominable practice, while thousands are injured."

Avarice-> Only lazy people don't want to put effort in finding data and reason within the data.
Iniquity -> No data - surely does involves politics and biased judgement as there is no rationale.
Mischief -> More a cause of nuisance for the sane and rational people.

A potion made of above three is nothing short of organizational evil and thus can only result in bad things for most and only a select few gain out of it.