It kind of is. The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story. As the article points out, the main beneficiary of this is Google - who are essentially competing with the Guardian for ad sales. I don't always agree with the Graun, but I believe in plurality rather than a Google-dominated world.

Throwaway because of inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.

> The Guardian is funded by advertising and this limits their ad sales story ... inevitable downvotes from the privacy crowd.

The privacy crowd are right; and so are you. This is a huge internal conflict the web today - how do you make it pay, keep it free and not have it track users?

Indeed. I think we need to be a bit more nuanced about what we ask for.

Simple referrer information is very valuable to the Guardian (and others who sell ads), and is in most circumstances not a significant privacy leak. Cross-site tracking via third-party cookies, however, has significant privacy implications.

I would like to see a user/advertiser understanding of "this far and no further". But unfortunately the debate is sufficiently polarised I can't see any change to the current situation, where the tech-savvy disable everything and the less experienced stick with their defaults, which effectively reduces it to an arms race between the big browser manufacturers and a handful of ad networks.

This presumes that 'keep it free' is actually desirable. Free journalism means the person reading it is the product. Perhaps the less of that, the better.

the existing model has been to subsidize newspaper sales with advertising for a very long time. This same model carried forward through radio and television.

The alternative is a pay-per-view service, or subscribing to wires. I haven't done any research into the viability of that type of service, but it is a paradigm shift.

Pick two.

It has been the "not track users" that has suffered; the other two have been picked.

The gist of this article is that users have found ways to not be tracked: this was inevitable, the person running the browser has a lot of control over what the browser sends and where.

So, that pick isn't working all the time any more.

>The Guardian is funded by advertising

Not entirely, no. It is funded by a trust, and part of the Guardian Media Group is an investment fund.

...yet when you read it, it sounds like the explanation is that someone clicks on a link in an app, which opens that link using Chrome (or whatever the WWW intent app is) and somewhere en route the referrer is lost.

The collar doesn't match the cuffs in this article, methinks.