The answer is to make ads unprofitable. When someone pays for advertising, they must get no return on their investment. Only then will ads disappear from the web. In order to achieve this, all ads must be blocked automatically and by default, no exceptions must be made, and the blocker software must be pre-installed for all users.
https://adnauseam.io/free-adnauseam.html
https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
This being said, the current W3C Advertising API draft proposal on serving ads is possibly inspired by it.
What is this?
The draft of the proposed new standard for ads on the web
They don't have a right to a business model. I do have a right to privacy. If they can't come up with a viable business model that respects privacy, they don't deserve to exist.
It's like when people claim Google can't afford decent tech support. If that's the case then Google shouldn't exist.
Hopefully if enough people did this, the manufacturers would get the message.
Advertisers are overpaying for a more "targeted audience" but I suspect in the end the point is moot.
Simple case: ads that retarget you to something you googled previously (but they don't know you just bought it or gave up on buying it)
These kinds of sites are already behind a paywall for most of the content you'd want to see, as Graham notes. I do not understand why sites like the New York Times, which generate massive amounts of traffic as far as I know, cannot use other real estate on their websites to serve static ads with zero nefarious tracking enabled. The model already exists for their physical product. I fail to see why we can't have a version of the Internet that ports over that previously successful system.
I don't work in Internet ads; I work in hardware. So maybe someone here can help me understand why what I would otherwise assume to be a simple implementation is viewed as impossible. I'm obviously missing something.
And from NYT (or other publisher) perspective, 20 of the later is presumably more lucrative than 1 of the former
The meassurement of this being true is just as good as a Game ad published in a computer magazine.
If you didn't use them you'd have to explain to your shareholders why you decided to leave money on the table.
But I guess it's not a perfect solution or more publications might have adopted it.
Media advertising really started about 1850-1860, when there were mass-market goods produced that required advertising to create a market. Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate).
You didn't have advertising without mass production, mass literacy, and mass media.
Hamilton Holt wrote in 1909 of the effects of advertising on his industry in Commercialism and Journalism, a short, easy, but highly informative read:
Even if we only take the age of the printing press in Europe, it's still over 500 years of advertisement without tracking.
Even if we only take the age of mass-produced media, it's almost 200 years without tracking.
Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate).
People were not literate.
Printing and publishing were expensive.
There were very few mass products.
Wikipedia: "The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
The point is scale and pervasiveness.
Barkers, criers, the odd promotional papyrus or clay tablet, a shop signboard, are not the mass advertising of the latter 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.
Mass advertising, such as it might be thought to exist, was largely propagandistic, in that word's original sense.
People are simply not willing to pay: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1219911533070897153