There is a chicken-and-egg component to social media. Marketers and publishers have a vague sense that there is value to be mined from the information that can be gleaned from blogs, personal profiles, consumer-generated media, comments, product reviews, podcasts, social bookmarking and wikis. But no one has moved beyond that to convincingly productize that information.

Unlike social media, behavioral targeting is a marketing platform created expressly for advertisers. It is a solution generated to solve a problem and meet a market demand. Essentially, consumers do not generate enough premium contextual targeting opportunities. As a result, behavioral targeting is able to exploit additional inventory that might have been deemed less valuable to advertisers. In comparison to social media and consumer-generated content, behavioral targeting is a relatively mature marketplace.