Putting aside the fact that Silicon Valley is doing a lot more than whatever makes the front page of TechCrunch today, there's still the fact that in order to get an ad impression you have to provide something that an actual person somewhere ostensibly finds useful. At it's worst this is orders of magnitude more useful than Wall Street's endless arbitrage seeking to benefit the richest of the rich without actually providing anything that is useful to someone with less than 10M dollars.
AdTech is a broken industry with most participants providing zero to negative value to the world. They are basically just nodes in a messy, unregulated, scam-ridden chain of players moving an ad from technically illiterate buy side to an equally illiterate sell side, taking something like 70% of the money in the process. Zero value for humanity, no comparison to Wall Street...
