Only because they're viewed. If we can get everyone to install an ad blocker, that price will plummet, and business models that aren't based on abusing users will be allowed to succeed.
I really just feel that 1. Advertising is manipulative and evil in its' modern form, and 2. Targeting further multiplies its' ability to do evil.
I'm not convinced that what we receive in exchange for empowering 1 and 2 is in any way worth it.
If your goal is the open web of yore, that doesn’t exactly sound like a win.
It wasn't until everyone started fighting SEO-wise that you ran into the issue of fraud pages of nothing but links and sketchy ads that were the byproduct of reverse engineering Google's PageRank algorithm of the time. In fact, before SEO, there really wasn't that much of a niche for "Social Media" proper. A creator's web page and web ring were basically the social networks of the time, and arguably much less addictive or prone to scraping in the sense most back and forth was BBS/IRC/Email/Forum.
I remember the first time I overheard someone pitching SEO while eating lunch with the lunch pool from the office. If I were more the type to barge in at that time I'd have called them out as the fool they were being for corrupting a seachable index. Little was I expecting at the time that engineering indexes was the New Big Business and that the Web I knew was in the process of being obliterated and replaced with the shark infested botnet and data hoard-i-tron we have today.
Imagine a world without ubiquitous IP geolocation. One without rampant browser fingerprinting. Without everyone and their brother wanting you to subscribe for a recurring revenue stream. Without widespread collusion amongst industry actors to embed DRM circuitry or backdoors into every General Purpose piece of hardware under the sun.
It was a completely different world and tone to computing. It was your tool, and it was there to empower you; not to shovel crap through your bloody hardware whether you wanted it or not.
I couldn't get out of all these either but I keep them strictly separated in Firefox tab containers. I think it works because Facebook always suggests friends to me whom I don't know at all, and its ads have no relevance to me (only to the 1 or 2 topics I use FB for).
In exchange you'll get completely opaque and abusable serverside user tracking systems and encrypted html pages.
This isn't what you want.
In a world where there is no targeted ads, companies still need to get clients and compete. The marketing budgets of companies would not miraculously go down if targeted ads ceased to exist, the money would just go to other means, and non targeted ads are a very good candidate (also they can be extremely hard to block as they can be served first party if needed)
If marketing returns drop, all other things being equal, budgets being cut is the natural consequence, because less spending will be possible before declining marginal returns result in negative net returns to further spending.
The various annoying remarketing schemes are a tiny part of advertising technology and really only exist because of the well-meaning but poorly thought-out ideas about privacy on the web.