Without Google AdX and the mess of disturbing cross-site tracking, I can't see why advertisers wouldn't just spend 100% of their digital budgets in walled gardens. It would just be so much more effective.
That is, advertising camping gear on a camping review site (without tracking) still has some nonzero commercial value even if facebook tracking exists and works.
For a large site like Facebook, adblockers might have a small effect, but for smaller sites seeing 30-50% adblocked traffic, their choices might be direct ad sales, and likely little else. I saw a post about ethical-ad-server recently, and maybe such ad servers should be the ones default unblocked by adblockers.
Precisely this. Go back to the advertising model where you place the advertisements in relevant locations. It's like going into the local pizza parlor and seeing an advertisement for a local plumber.
"Joe's Pizza" in Somewhere, NY can still say "I only want advertisers who want their ads shown in 30 mile radius of Somewhere, NY".
Flip the entire thing on its head and go back to camping sites showing camping ads, and auto parts stores showing ads for the latest amazing oil filter. They don't need to know who the user is at all. They are on a camping related site, they probably want to see camping related advertisements.
If I wanted to be generous I could point to the fact that advertiser revenue allows companies to realise a revenue stream other than having to directly charge a customer, be that subscription or increased prices. And so it could be argued that as a consumer you get an indirect benefit from advertising dollars, it's not clear that it's actually exploitive in that sense.
Full disclosure, I run adblockers and used to work for an adtech company.
Take the camping example. If I sell camping equipment, I can try to reach out to blogs directly, but I will have to place hundreds of campaigns for $100 each, track and monitor them all separately, and count on each of the blogs to deliver them accurately in good positions with no fraud. Or I can just buy one massive campaign with Facebook that runs across Facebook and Instagram and targets people who are interested in camping and maybe even expressed purchase intent. That's the better option every time. The transactions costs of dealing with individual websites are prohibitive.
Google (and the other tracking companies) just distribute that same option across the open web. If you get rid of it, Facebook wins absolutely.
I like the idea, as one commenter expressed, that the open web would be better without advertising. But I think the reality of an infinitely powerful Facebook is that the open web would be a wasteland and afterthought.
It's a purely regulatory solution, though, not technical as the top level comment suggested :)
So you couldn't select 18-25 recently-single white female within 50km as a target category (or whatever else you come up with).
I think GDPR may already forbid such use (without consent), though the implementation is tricky.
Yes it is quite some work and overhead, but you are extracting information and use it in a way the person could not foresee or conceptualize even exists within the data.