And yet I don't see a micropayments solution from either yet for when the ad-pocalypse hits.
It won't hit. Most people just won't pay for content, but publishers have to make money. If ad-blocker use continues to rise, everything will simply go native. It means more clickbait article titles with even less thinly-veiled ads masquerading as legitimate content.
The current native advertising model, where advertisers negotiate individually with each site where they want content to be posted, will quickly evolve into a more efficient AP-style network. Companies will submit articles into a feed that will be disseminated to and automatically displayed on revenue and content-hungry sites across the Internet. Sites will be compensated on a CPM or CPC basis.
Ads are not going anywhere. They will just take a slightly different form.
And then, we add clickbait recognition (e.g. find the source, compare similar topic articles) and we solve this problem.
Current ad-blocks are similar to blacklists. They are very basic, but they do get the vast majority of unsolicited advertisement, so it works. I remember the days when some argued that you only needed to block chines IP ranges in order to stop spam.
Then the world started to use content filtering, looking for specific words or statistically pattern that provide a probability patter for spam vs ham. I would predict that a AP-style network that automatically submit articles into multiple "spammy" websites would automatically be flagged by anti-spam organizations and thus be quickly blocked.
Native ads is also currently in a bit of a problem with tax and customer protection laws. That might just be growing pains however.
Actually, yes. Everyone started creating opt-in email newsletters. The smarter marketers started creating niche newsletters that appeared to not be associated with any particular brand, then worked in mentions of their benefactors everywhere they could. That's native advertising.
The "grid" might not (i'm not even sure what that means?), but in this case the website doesn't know who you are, the ad itself doesn't know who you are (especially because it's not shown), only the ad-network-provider knows who you are.
Sure, the grid only knows where you live, if you own or rent, size of your household, when you're home or away.
Heck with a bit of data mining on "smart meters", I bet you could infer the energy usage of certain appliances such as hair dryer, curling iron, stove, etc., starting to give insight into age, gender, ethnicity, eating habits, you name it. By itself that data will only generate weak correlations, but I'd certain that energy companies are finding buyers for that data who could match it with your credit report, background check, etc.
Face it, the only thing protecting your anonymity is your lack of notoriety.
https://sense.com/ does this, figuring out what different things you run at home and knowing when they're on.
There's actually a weird way that control over your devices and privacy on your devices are at odds here: if your device was running signed code from the ground up, where you were given a browser and had no ability to modify anything, then we could build an ad system that leaked no information to the various ad industry companies but still let them be sure that a view was a real view and a click was a real click. But of course we do want to be able to control the software we run, and we successfully rejected trusted computing for most uses in the '00s, so instead we have all this tracking.
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-badger/pke...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/privacy-badge...
This is a bit too much over the top, where it concerns tin-foil hat fashion. Ad companies track and profile so that they can show you ads. There's no secret campaign there. Just plain basic ad target segmentation. They do make money on ads -- they're ad companies, not profiling companies.
It's the one remaining hope for quality journalism, but apparently they need to stare into the abyss before they get their act together. That, or it needs a mass extinction first until it is obvious that the supply of original content is visibly reduced (unlike now, where about 10-15 publications produce excellent content and thousands turn it into autogenerated slideshow).
For every thousand (suppressed) impressions, pay a dollar to the site. Sites, who are now actively blocking ad blockers, can stop blocking and get similar revenue. Users, who do not want ads, can get that experience without the guilt associated with freeloading.
All it takes is for one major browser vendor to take the first step.
Mozilla, are you listening? Microsoft, this is how you undermine adwords.
I wouldn't hold my breath.