> One site ( a non profit, where donators also complain about how much money they spend on servers and wages), can't be a reference for an online business. The chance to duplicate this is minimal + it has thousands of free employees / volunteers that don't need to be paid.
It was one example, not every single free thing on the Internet that I find highly valuable. Open source would be another, which is mostly supported by volunteers and straight-up paying customers.
> If you only need a encyclopedia, then you don't need to pay anywhere or "free payment through ads". If you sometimes scroll HN and read content for free, then i'm not sure if the content, that you want to read, is only available on Wikipedia.
HN is mostly a replacement for playing Minesweeper or is displacing doing something actually valuable. Or hanging out on IRC. If I actually need news I'd be fine with paying for it (I mostly don't, though).
> I think a lot of that content is actually produced by paid journalists, that work for big media companies.
We had those (journalists, big media companies) before spying ads were a thing. We'd have them after. You think that, for some reason, if no one can use spying ads anymore, that'll mean the end of online media? Or even just online news? Or that Internet advertising would even do more than hiccup for a moment and keep going? Think about it: you're responsible for advertising at Coca Cola. Tracking ads go away, everywhere, for everyone. Do you stop spending ad dollars online? No, obviously not.
My guess is the result would be a concentration of ad dollars on bigger sites, with little or no reduction in total spending. Probably more shitty "native advertising" too, especially for smaller players, which sucks, but we already have tons of that so oh well. Point is, we've all been pining for the days when news orgs had actual money to spend on reporters, and I'd not be a bit surprised if eliminating tracking gave bigger players enough of an advantage that those days came back.