Everybody’s on about the end of the web due to more and more people using adblockers. In one camp are the ones (me included) who are sick and tired of ads and tracking, and on the other side the ones accusing me and my kind of stealing content.
What ad providers try to do is to serve us as many ads as possible, hoping we’re interested in any one of them. At the same time, the whole tracking deal is to find out which ads we could be more interested in. That latter almost seems like it’s in our interest. Or would be if it worked better and didn’t involve the general creepiness of advertisers trying to read our minds and share it with others.
But I think there is a solution.
Imagine if you had a settings sheet in the browser or in an extension, where you as a user could declare what kind of thing interests you in general. The browser presents this selection to sites you go to, allowing them to present you with targeted advertising without a lot of second guessing. I, as a user, would be less frustrated, and wouldn’t want or need adblocking. The advertiser would have a much higher conversion rate. And the site owner could make such a preference header a requirement to visit the site. In exchange, there’s no need for tracking to try to guess my preferences; I already told you myself.