Very interesting point of view. My main takeaway from this is "Better ads than paywalls" which entails that the only alternative to ads is a paywall which I don't agree with. I think that there is a middleground with freemium, free trial model.
Also there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.
There is third way - crypto mining on user computers. I would prefer to mine some crypto for someone instead of seeing ads. Biggest problem: mobile users would be much less "valuable".
Also there was a comment somewhere I can't find right now "There are 2 ways to make money in the internet - bundling and unbundling" with this I think there is value of a paywall that bundles, see Apple News. In the end I don't like the way AdTech works right now, I am not sure about what's next. I don't think explicit regulation is the way, especially since Internet is international and law is as a rule local. But either we will sell our data to monopolies or we will die in bills for selfhosting everything and even though involuntarily our internet histories will be sold.