ReadTheDocs and sites like BikeRadar are my favourite examples: If I go to a bike site, I expect the ads I see to be about bike stuff. If I'm on a technical site (like Stack Overflow or ReadTheDocs) I expect to see ads about related technical topics.
Unfortunately the advertising industry has gone down the route of hyper-invasive, user-data focused advertising, for what I consider to be very little benefit to either publishers or users. The only people who benefit are those who pedal the tech that enables this market.
With all the ML tools available to us now, I'm not sure why we couldn't build tools that accurately match ad content to site content. You don't need to invasively track users users this way either, because you only ever need to be concerned with the topic of the site/article and not who's seeing it.
It's much easier to target the publication than the individual user.
Even if advertisers analysed the page content on seeing it, rather than the publisher, it would still be net faster than doing lookups/analysis per adserve (as you would when you target a user).
I don't think it would be hard at all to build something which analysed a page and made an adserving decision with a lower "time to ad display" than a similar process that used user data.
New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.
Advertising, in the modern sense, is, well, modern. You pretty much simply did not have goods to advertise (or the means to advertise them) other than for very specific items -- think classifieds rather than bulk and mass advertising.
The rise of the factory system, of transport networks, and the capacity to create far more of a good than local demand could absorb created the first modern-style advertising in about 1860. The first prominently-featured adverts were the 19th century equivalents of Viagra ads: mostly-ineffective patent medicines.
Hamilton Holt has a delightful contemporary account of this, written (and presented as a lecture, it's short) in 1909, looking back on the previous 50 years or so of publishing history. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...
I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.
Tracking and microtargeting just seem too attractive for advertisers to pass up. Same goes for large size, autoplay, multimedia ads.
These mechanisms would have to fail to perform in obvious ways (not long-term, subtle, whole-market ways) before people will stop using them.