> I'm not quite sure what the answer is.

It's very simple, it's what they've been doing in print media for centuries: contextual advertising.

Print media did also include e.g. coupons with discount codes with which advertisers could learn which lead led through a sale.

	▲	Retric 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Print media was also trying to guarantee their audience was an actual person by charging nominal fees. Without any transactions or user tracking it’s difficult to separate ‘legitimate’ content farms from those using bot farms to boost their page views.

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gedy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes seriously - I'm old enough to have enjoy reading magazines that had ads throughout them. They were fine.

I'd venture to say contextual advertising would be more effective than whatever we've been trying to squeeze out of fingerprinting etc. All this supposed "data" they are gathering feels like a scam perpetuated by ad companies about how important it is to the people who buy ads. It's not.

Even Facebook and Instagram, which pretty much should know you to a tee is completely ineffectual at advertising to me - like at all.

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hedora 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The main “problem” with contextualized advertising is that the people producing the content get a larger share of the ad spend.

Targeted ads concentrate control over the market into a few players, which can do things like acquire competitors or run them out of business with loss leaders.

With AI, the supply of ad real estate will go to infinity, so the only thing that will matter is the quality of the places the ads run.

This would be a good time to ban targeted advertising, or for the content producers to form a cartel that only purchases contextual ads.

That cartel will probably be even worse than what we have now, since it’s going to be 2-3 mega conglomerates like Disney, and they already have handed editorial control over to the White House.

Hopefully the invisible hand of capitalism will somehow fix this.