> The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data
Purely, no. Primarily? You can bet your sweet ass.
Like I said, serve me an ad. I'm not an idealist, I understand why advertising exists. But don't justify collecting data about which articles I read to serve to some inscrutable network of advertisers by saying that it has to be this way. We don't need this version of advertising.
Majority, not all. Why should they leave money on the table, exactly?
Most companies are not achieving the platonic maximalization of profit or shareholder value. They leave money on the table for a variety of reasons. It's not beyond the pale that this would be one of them. If you don't agree, then frankly it's probably an axiomatic disagreement and I don't think we can reason one another to a synthesis.
You've just described the status quo, where businesses have to sacrifice their lifeblood to achieve your ideals. Those businesses tend to be beaten by more focused competitors, which results in the industry you see today, filled with winners that don't achieve your ideals.
But good luck trying to champion an efficient web industry by essentially moralizing.
But more to the point, you're presenting an argument which implies the NYT is a business which will be beaten by its competitors if it doesn't track users through their unrelated web history. I don't think that kind of tracking is an existential necessity for the NYT. It's not their core competency. Their core competency is journalism - if they are beaten by a competitor it won't be because the competitor has superior tracking, for several reasons:
1. Journalism is not a winner take all environment,
2. Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around,
3. The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere so they wouldn't have to know to within 0.001% precision whether or not a user will read an entire article just to be profitable.
I really don't think this is too idealistic. It's not like I'm saying they need to abandon advertising altogether. I don't even have a problem with the majority of advertising. It's the poor quality control and data collection that I take issue with. All I'm saying is that they don't need to do what they're doing to be profitable.
So? I'm not sure how this means that news orgs won't suffer from losing business to competitors with superior tracking.
> Newspapers were surviving in online media well before this tracking was around
Markets change. Advertisers have different expectations. Readers have more news to choose from. This is a silly argument.
> The NYT already has sufficiently many inefficiencies that if they actually cared about user privacy, they could trim the fat elsewhere
Sure, but why? Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they trim the fat elsewhere AND keep the tracking to make more money?
The point you make doesn't really make sense. Yeah, it's theoretically possible for news orgs to stop tracking in the same way that it's theoretically possible for me to take out a knife right now and cut off my legs. News orgs can make up their losses elsewhere and survive in the same way that I can still get around with a wheelchair.
But why on earth would I or the NYT do that?
I respond to you with these questions because it seems to me that both you and the OP speak out against these practices because you feel they are unnecessary. My point is that they are necessary. You just don't acknowledge the forces that make them so.
It may be that they are, in fact, driving users away. Tracking user behaviour can become a distraction.
While it may give some insight does it give anything of meaning to know most people skim into the first few paragraphs before clicking away? Does it improve the writing quality or fact checking? Is it worth the risk of alienating customers over? To give a deliberately extreme and absurd example Victoria's Secret could hire people to stalk their customers to find out more about product failure conditions in the field but that would be a horrifying and stupid idea.
"Everybody is doing it." is a poor rationale for implementing a business practice.
The idea that tracking is purely or primarily there to support a business model of selling user data is a strawman invented by self-righteous HNers. You need to know what parts of your product are effective to make it competitive in today’s marketplace.