@shoq in digital, you can't have one without the other. We've had 20+ years of this auction-based behavioural ad sales model, Google and Facebook are entirely dependent on it for revenue. Untargeted advertising is not going to come back. See how the NYT website shows Google ads even to paid subscribers.

Open web advocates should find ways of reducing the cost of publishing online (hosting mostly), rather than finding "ethical" advertising partners to subsidize their work. They don't exist.

@glider85 @shoq

Frankly, this is absurd to me. DuckDuckGo's founders have spoken on this particularly - you don't need to do invasive tracking of a user in order to serve relevent ads. There's plenty of information availible based on the content near the ad.

People watching or viewing a particular piece of content usually fall under particular demographics. You can see this play out in real time with *sponsorships*. In fact I know that many Youtube channels get the predominate amount of their income from that!

Worse still, Google and other behavioral ad providers regularly lie about the effectiveness of their ads. They're completely opaque about it oftentimes.

Google & Facebook are horrible because they're giant monopolies. There are no better alternatives for most ad spread - they've captured most of the ad space. More ethical ads do exist they're just not mainstream.

The easiest example of this is affiliate links - they're non-intrusive, picked by the creator, and don't track you just by viewing them. It's an ad, just not a horrible one.

And we don't need compatibillity with the wider ad space. We can develop ad tools with strict publishing requirements. If a corporation wants to put ads on the Fedi, they should specifically come here wanting to do so - and subsequently abide by our standards. That's it.