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The great thing about advertising is it funds you no matter if you are famous or not. Bad thing is you have to live under their corporate censorship and all the baggage that goes with using third party sellers (privacy and inefficiency).

To use some of the examples in the article, not everyone can rely on national license fees (BBC), corporate sponsorship (NPR), consistently making a loss (The Guardian), search engines (Mozilla), having a legacy business (CNN) etc.

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FWIW, my post is not a rant against advertising in general. It's about doing it with such a large volume of code & third parties involved, leaning on my bandwidth & CPU to cover for a lack of coordination.

Toward the end of the post I say something like "what if we actually accepted the fact that ads are a way of funding the web at large" and mention some Mozilla efforts in that direction

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