How do you know the highway billboard or TV commercial lead to conversions?

Maybe it helps society to go back to such models over destroying privacy.

(And as answer to the question: Statistical methods by comparing areas/times with no ads vs. with ads etc.)

That ship already sailed. People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI.

As much as many HN readers would love to see ads and even the most benign forms of tracking to disappear, if you're aiming for something realistic (e.g that would still allow ads to exist and be a minimum profitable for all involved) you cannot just go back to the dark ages, and show the same ads to everyone.

You don't have to show the same ads to everyone.

You can - without detailed tracking - identify rough location of the user. (IP etc.)

You can pick ads based on the content, not based on the user. (A site with beauty tips probably has different readers from a site on woodworking; a site with celebrity news has different readers than deep political analysis)

And yes, Google and Facebook would make less money (disclaimer: I have a handful Alphabet shares in my portfolio and probably funds containing those) and yes spread would be higher, but this could still pay a lot of bills and interestingly could lead to revert from clickbait to proper content, as readers of proper content are more likely the target audience for high-paid ads.

Strangely, I still see plenty of billboards and TV commercials.

Well TV commercial effects on web traffic and on revenue are measurable. We do that for a client. We can even tell which creatives, channels, surrounding program types work better.

Ad tech doesn’t a priori have the right to do whatever they dream up. We can choose to fight it with both legal and technical means.

> People are not going back to blind ad investment most of which has incredibly low ROI.

Not willingly, but perhaps they can be forced through legislation. In any case, as long as the industry insists on spying on me, I will continue to fight them tooth and nail.

So what service do I subscribe to so that I never see ads at all?

Ads are pollution, and need to be treated as such. Information providers need to develop business models which do not depend upon advertising revenue. (foundations, Patreon, whatever).

I would love that. Unfortunately I also love the fact that I can share links to sites without paywall issues. I don't know how to combine those things in a working manner. But I hope there are smarter people than me.

Short term: Less tracking is good. (Not only for privacy, but also since I don't want to see "optimized" content – I want to be surprised, contradicting opinions etc. like in a good newspaper)

Tracking clicks is easy and non-invasive. Tracking exhibitions is basically impossible, even if the browser cooperates. So you either take the number of direct conversions the easy way, or you do some of the many causal research techniques later to try to discover indirect conversions.

The one thing that you can't reliably do, browser privacy or not, is gathering the useless number ad-companies currently rely on.

Tracking incremental conversions is possible with statistics but only if you know who saw your ads.