Give me the adds but keep the trackers

08-12-2025

Some people complain that the internet started going to shit when every page started displaying adds. Well, it couldn't just be free forever, right? There are millions of websites out there that are not really trying to sell you anything, just share information. I do believe that, genuinely, some people just want to share their knowledge and opinions and engage with other like-minded people. But that information still has a value and there is also a cost to broadcast it. I also believe in the right to monetize what you know, so if you know a lot about plants and want to write a website about that, why shouldn't you make some money off of it?

Now, the question is how that money is made. I believe there are ethical ways to make money and there are un-ethical ways to make it; it boils down to a simple principle: consent.

If you are just showing the reader a few adds in your page, the reader can see them and dismiss them and keep on reading the content, and maybe there's a 0.01% chance that they'll click on the add if it's something they are interested in; there is still consent here. It's a small chance, but with enough readers, that small percentage makes the add worth it for the advertiser. As soon as you start adding trackers behind the adds, there is no more consent because the reader doesn't know they are being tracked, or doesn't know to what extent and what is being done with their information. Whether they click on the add or not, it doesn't really matter anymore, value has already been extracted from them. The reader has become the product. Many websites don't even bother having adds now because a) they know that most users have some form of add-block extension; and b) they can get more value out of you by selling your data than on the small chance you'll click on an add.

See, the problem is not with the adds themeselves, it's what's behind them. I would much rather open a web page and see a few adds for unrelated things that may or may not be interesting to me and know that that's all there is to it, than to have this feeling that wherever I go, whatever I do, I'm being followed, observerd, every click analyzed, and likely even manipulated by algorithms; that not just the adds, but the content itself if algorithmically designed for maximun engagement.

I miss the old days when you would open a page, see a banner add at the top and another one in the middle; maybe there was a 0.01% chance that the add was for sommething you might actually care about and would click on it and if not you just had the choice to dismiss them and keep reading the content. It seems like even that choice has been taken away from us. Of course, part of the reason we all started using add-blockers was because those adds just became too much. I mean, on a regular page with adds, almost half of the space in the page is add-space. That's too much. But you get my point.