Until thumb drives became large enough to fit most datasets it stopped becoming Big Data. Just normal data.

Hell you mean a decade ago? I still see businesses running losses left right and center saying that they're gonna monetize user data, any day now.

Related "monetizing user data" seems to just mean ads. Ads on everything, forever, until the userbase gets fed up and moves to a new service that definitely won't do that, and the cycle repeats about every 3 years.