I wonder how much of this is a scam on the advertisers too, sure the platform might have great detail for targeting ads, but if someone comes along and outbids on generic terms it isn’t going to do you much good as an advertiser either.
I used to lead the product team for a publisher that makes the majority of its income from ads. It was a constant fight between the commercial teams and us.
Commercial wanted to stuff every page with as many ads and trackers as possible. We wanted to ensure the user didn’t have a miserable experience. As the company liked getting money, we, and the user, generally lost.
I kept an instance of Chrome blocker-free to see the site in all its ad-stuffed glory, but after learning a bit about how things work, I block all the things with extreme prejudice for personal browsing. And ensure friends & family do too.
I think tracking page clicks is completely different to invasive data profiling. Anything that could theoretically be tracked server-side (like a link click) is fair game. The only reason it's done client side is easy implementation.
When a site is littered with ads, the content probably sucks, too.
Could the ads make the internet more usable? For example, they help evaluate the content before reading it and leading one to find better quality content sooner.
> I imagine you have some role in building the internet since you're on HN.
I do. I sit in a tiny corner where we just build websites without all that JS and tracking bullshit. (That's not to say that I never use JS, I just use it very sparingly.)
It's just a different philosophy. I don't need to know how many people exactly listen to my podcast. It's much more rewarding to me when I meet random people and they say "Oh you're that guy? I loved your last episode." That's 100 times more awesome than seeing a download counter increment.
