Same. But I think that once you've screwed the pooch this bad, you can't just take a single step backwards and expect everyone to be fine with that. The trust is gone. You've got to reboot and rebrand somehow.

Don’t track. Serve ads in a designated space across all pages (sidebar). I personally would happily uninstall adblocker if those two things came true.

The problem is that the advertising companies wanted the offline marketing spend so much that they started selling the dream of tracking with specificity, which caused marketeers the world over to finally have an answer to the age old 'I don't know which half I spend wrong' question.

Advent of Code does a great job at this. Its ads are text-based, relevant, and unintrusive. Of course, it has a pretty particular aesthetic, but plenty of sites could do a simple (non-animated) image or text to surface their sponsor without being annoying.

Shameless plug: this is what we are trying to do at https://contextcue.com. Ads that are targeted to the website you’re on, instead of the person viewing the ad. We’d love any feedback about what we are trying to accomplish!

That's great! I wish you well.