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Comment by al_james | Hacker News Reader

You don't like websites earning money for providing you with free content?

This is a fallacy. A site's business model is it's own responsibility.

Be that as it may, most of the sites I (at least) enjoy every day use the free content for advertising model. Very few of the sites would be able to make the transition to another business model that did not rely on advertising.

But that point (that sites give away free content for advertising) doesn't have much to do with blub's point (that many sites use hostile, non-privacy friendly tactics for advertising).

Basing your site revenue on advertising doesn't require trackig across sites/domains, supercookies written in flash, circumvention of user-defined browser privacy settings, etc (which is probably what blub is talking about). Honestly it doesn't even require cookies or retaining IP logs, though I don't think anyone here is arguing that those are malicious.

That's why your comment is a fallacy. Websites providing me content for free, and websites respecting the privacy of their users are not mutually exclusive concepts.

In an ideal world, yes. However, in the real world, most high paying advertising campaigns are retargeting based, thus requiring cross domain tracking. Excluding such tracking limits you to lower paying campaigns and remnant backfill. Most publishers are simply forced to accept such policies otherwise their earnings would reduce significantly.

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