Even a 1% success rate is considered phenomenal in the advertising world, and as annoying as the ads became, it is true that tracking and targeting increased the value of ad impressions significantly when they were first introduced. The same is true of annoyances: popups, audio, and such: they simply worked.

But the people are speaking out. They don't want to be tracked by marketers, and they have been putting considerable effort into blocking the tracking efforts. Some estimates claim that as many as half the browsers on the Web now have some form of ad-blocking installed, and while the actual numbers probably aren't THAT high, it's not unreasonable to think that maybe one-quarter, or even one-third, of people may be blocking ads because of the annoying and tracking behaviors that advertisers have come to rely on.

When one takes this into consideration, surely it must be the case that annoying and tracking are now hurting advertising revenue far more than they help. It is, perhaps, time for advertisers to buck that trend: a return to the mass-marketing model that built media empires as recently as fifteen years ago. Or perhaps it is time to turn to a new kind of targeting: rather than going after individual users, target the sites themselves, directing advertisements to users based on the common interests that drive them to the places they go.

Imagine an advertiser that used such a model or something like it, and in return, pledged not to track or annoy the people who see its ads: a sort of "DuckDuckGo of advertising." Would you whitelist that advertiser in your ad-blocker? I would, and I doubt that I'm alone. I don't block ads just to stick it to the advertising agencies; I block them to make the Web usable and safe. Many people do. I wonder if a business model could be built on those people. Maybe even one that, on account of its wider viewer base, could eclipse the current tracking/annoyance models.