The world did fine prior to the advertisements and the world will be fine after the advertisements fail. Simply because somebody asks you to become a sheeple doesn't mean you are required to become one. No need to fall into lock step and comply.
You aren't an underground revolution fighting the man. You installed a browser plugin.
Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.
The issue here has two sides: on the practical side it is much easier to block all ads than to maintain a white list while on the attitude style a website that tells its visitors "I could not care less about your privacy and your browsing experience" by showing ads and running third partu tracking scripts should not be surprised when a growing portion of visitors return the favor "we don't care about your failed business model, we do care about our privacy and browsing experience though" by blocking said ads.
If adblocking wasn't a game changer revolution, we wouldn't be reading the IAB telling us "we messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
So there is a happy medium and, in your opinion, it's non-targeted ads. Yet uBlock and uBlock Origin and the millions of people that use them are blocking DuckDuckGo ads.
piwik is an open-source, locally installed, piece of analytic's software that is blocked by default in the above AND in adblock.
So you are making an argument that is presently being implemented and still being blocked.
IMO there is no happy medium, all ads are unwelcomed on the net.
duckduckgo debunks the myth that ads need to be targeted as is the usual investor storytime myth.
I was using phpmyvisites before it spawned piwik and have been pushing piwik as an alternative to google analytics since, still piwik is a tracking mechanism and as such is expected to be blocked, but additional tracking script vs parsing web server logs is another debate.
> Duckduckgo makes a good case for non-targeted ads while still being profitable.
For what reason exactly? So they debunked a myth that is moot anyway because the very premise of the myth is unwelcome.
But most ads and most sites aren't like that. How are people supposed to know which are trustworthy?