We have a few options for monetizing on the web:
1. Sell stuff (e-commerce, subscriptions, services).
2. Sell ads (every website that's free except Wikipedia).
3. Ask for donations (Wikipedia).
I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website).
We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads
Not really. You just need to look at any normal billboard; advertisers bought that billboard, even though it knows nothing about demographics or "attribution".
Tracking just makes advertising more cost-effective. To the advertiser, not to me. I'm not an advertiser; I gain nothing from the cheapness of advertising. It makes no difference to me whether an ad is targeted or not; I don't want to see it. Especially if it writhes and wriggles distractingly, or autoplays video.
> To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people…
Wasn't Google's initial pitch that it would provide ads selectively based on the content of the page? All this demographics and individual tracking part in modern metrics seems to be mostly misleading.
For decades, ads were sold based on media analysis – and it worked well. There is nothing that says that it would work unconditionally with tracking only. You may even miss your most important potential customers entirely with tracking, since your product may be lacking general exposure. You may be also missing a broader cultural feedback, which is what sells most products in the end. (Most ads try to assign a cultural vector to the product, or to associate a product with an existing one, this is a major mechanism. You may require a certain amount of social resonance and common references to achieve this. It may well be, that this dysfunctionality of targeted advertising is what gave birth to the phenomenon of the influencer.)
I think I agree with you, but I would add another option: buy subscription services. These services have a strong incentive to keep their userbase happy.
> If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
I'm tongue and check for numbers 2 and 3. But with money coming in, people get paid. If you don't get paid, you don't eat. If you don't eat, you don't poop. If you don't poop, you die.
To sell ads, websites need to be able to show what demographics of people have clicked on ads, or else people will want to avoid buying ad space. Unless it's a huge brand like NFL, people aren't going to buy random ad space. You can do this in a walled garden logged-in app (a la Instagram or Facebook) or with _some_ form of tracking (every non-subscription publishing website).
We either roll out a way to do demographic tracking or every site will move into a logged-in method and sell data between one another on the backend. If you'd rather not get tracked, your best bet is to just not use the site to begin with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.