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I can count the times I bought something from a banner ad. I think it's exactly zero. The most something does to me is retargeting and that I find highly offensive when I notice it.

So as a customer I do think that I rather have no ads at all (if they are ineffective on me) than tailored ones.

When i search for flights or rentals, i get followed it by several days. Its for me a good reminder. So yeah, i click on them and its a good tool for me.

Imagine a store clerk doing a similar thing after going window shopping to understand why many people would prefer to avoid such a thing.

I know that other people find it creepy. I just want express my point of view too. And I do not mind. Another example: i like it, when hotels recognize my behaviour patterns and can adapt to it. Though i do not like to be talked to by my first name and when they try to be my friend. :-)

> I'm not sure that from a consumer perspective, I'm happy about this. Ads won't ever go away so instead of getting ads that are relevant to my persona, I'm going to start getting ads on things that don't interest me.

Or maybe the industry will be shaken up so hard that people are forced to think of alternatives to ads. Some cities actually managed to ban billboards, I hope that GDPR will have a similar effect on the Web.

The greed of a couple bad apples has gone so out of hand that the web is basically unusable without adblockers - while I actually work for a creative agency, as a private person I say that the current state is no longer tolerable...

> imagine big red letters warning about big problems if the 'yes' button is not clicked

Oh I assume and hope the regulators will strike down any such measures. They did, for example, also strike out mandatory newsletter acceptances (i.e. those where you could not create an account without "consenting" into handing your data over to advertising).

I understand this and I've noticed trends with the news sites going back to a subscription based model due to adblockers. The drawbacks to any model that is premium is that a large part of the audience is cut off from the content. For the publisher it is ok because that audience is non-monetizing but those readers are essentially cut off from information because they might not be able to afford it. That is similar to the Web 1.0 days when a large part of the world was using shady sites as most US based sites where hidden behind a paywall.

Adblockers and ads actually are a vicious cycle. Adblockers block ads which then requires more ads to be shown to the people without adblockers in order to recoup revenue which forces those people to install more adblockers.

We are already seeing attempts (from shady sites) to mine cryptocurrency in the background. While this might work on desktop, it is killer for the phones and not very usable.

My best bet is for the Web to find their own model of micropayments with freemium content similar to how mobile games are doing it.

> My best bet is for the Web to find their own model of micropayments with freemium content similar to how mobile games are doing it.

As long as banks make a fortune off of microtransactions despite having no real costs associated with them micropayments in the cent (or, worse, sub-cent) range won't happen. That needs to change.

I think Flattr is the most promising way forward as a source of non-ad revenue for websites as it doesn't require explicit user interactions once set up, it just runs in the background, tracks what you consume, and then automagically distributes your allocated funds to the sites in accordance with your consumption.

> men receiving women care product ads, or advertising for baby products when I'm single etc.

Maybe occasionally, but it's not like advertisers are going to completely lose their minds and forget how to target ads. They will just go back to targeting demographics instead of targeting specific people like they do in most forms of media.

The only thing that would bother me about 'irrelevant ads' is that I can't tell for sure whether or not they are still creating and selling profiles of me but in a more intransparent, shady fashion. In other words, as a user the GDPR would not restore my faith in FB.