I'll be mildly amused if sites are forced to return to server-side log collection because enough folks have started using tracking blockers.
That's already available as a service from Cloudflare.[1] Since so many sites go through Cloudflare, they know what many large sites are doing.
I hope to have time to work on a server-side ad + analytics framework, purely as an exercise. Might work as a business as well, as a "boutique" version of an ad network for blogs and businesses who care about privacy/not shitting in their users' browsers. I noticed this kind of small network with "premium"/"nice" ads a couple of years ago, but I can't remember any names. I really liked the idea tho.
That's an idea I've had for a long time actually, but never made anything of it. Running ads server-side, maybe especially that the server can preload ads so there is no overhead for the actual users in loading the ad. That seems like a good idea to me.
The web is shit.
I've been doing this since 1996. I watched the transition from server-side analytics (one of my first jobs was implementing access log collection and anaylsis for a decently sized group of sites) to client-side.
I remember solutions like analog and on up to Urchin and then Urhcin's transiton to client-side and finally its acqusition by Google.
By 2000, anyone paying attention knew it would not end well.
So here we are, bloated web. I'll be mildly amused if sites are forced to return to server-side log collection because enough folks have started using tracking blockers.
Everything old is new again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_(program)