That would be really really hard to pull off for most publishers.
As a simple example: it breaks ad networks, which rely on you having a cookie that is shared across many domains to figure out what ads to show you. That doesn't really work if that 3rd party script is blockd.
Then it becomes like any other industry where there are ads and they target the demographic instead of the person. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out that someone visiting a parenting site's probably gonna be interested in things like childrens clothes.
That would rally hurt small publishers. For example, American Express is more or less willing to buy ads that appear pretty much anywhere so long as the the viewers have a certain income level. Absent an ad network, would ever publisher have to work with AmEx individually to try to convince them they have an appropriate audience?
The industry's dirty little secret is that for all the hand wringing about tracking and targeting, the tech is still really in its infancy and doesn't work very well.
Network ads already don't pay very much (IMHO) and removing the ability to build profiles on demographics would make them worth much less.
You're right that it's not a dealbreaker -- my startup would be OK since we ads direct to clients -- but mostly people aren't in a position to do that. It takes a team of ad sales and support staff, and a very particular kind of niche content.
It just means the publisher has to proxy delivery of the ad for the ad network. This will not be hard. It's effectively what happens inside apps anyway - the ad network gives you an SDK with an API and you integrate it in to your web site.
No, that won't do it. The ad network won't know who you are because it can only see what you've done on that site. With no way to carry an identifier between different domains, the value of the ad network is destroyed and ad techniques like retargeting (when you put something in your cart on one site and see a coupon for it on another) are impossible.
You (and the ad networks) seem to be under the mistaken impression that you have some sort of a right to that information. You don't, and acting like a stalker should be treated as such.
As another poster said, you target your ads to the content it is being published next to. Seriously, can you not see the damage you're doing by pushing "surveillance as a business" model? If your hopefully-profitable idea relies on a key aspect basically every single dystopian story ever told (fiction and non-fiction), maybe that's a sign you should find another way?
The alternative, if you want to keep pushing stupid gimmicks like that "coupon" thing, it will just push more and more people into treating the advertising industry (and later, internet commerce in general) as the enemy.
>> No, that won't do it. The ad network won't know who you are because it can only see what you've done on that site. With no way to carry an identifier between different domains, the value of the ad network is destroyed and ad techniques like retargeting (when you put something in your cart on one site and see a coupon for it on another) are impossible.
> because it can only see what you've done on that site
I'm not sure what the problem is - all they need is to ask the publisher to set the cookie for them. Then it's a first party cookie that is relayed on the back end to the ad network, who gets all the same information from it that they used to get.
I go to Site A and get a cookie. Now I got to Site B and since it's on a new domain I have no cookies set and am basically a brand new visitor, so I get another cookie. Even if both those cookies are being relayed to some backend, how can it ever tell that I'm the same person on Site A as Site B?
Then they'll have to start implementing workarounds. The EFF made an interesting tool [1] a few years ago to show how easily you can be tracked from your browser configuration and installed plugins/fonts/etc. There might be more advanced tricks nowadays.
Mobile is exactly where you don't want to rely on this kind of fingerprinting. Especially on iOS, it's a platform with only one rendering engine and no plugins.
Here's what it managed to get from my iPhone 6[1]. This would be the same 'fingerprint' as virtually every iPhone 6 user in the UK.
The ad network is able to serve content natively through the domain of both A and B. That means they can send back a beacon pixel to Site B from Site A's domain, which will let them link the two ids. They only need to do it one time to link up the ids for a pair of domains.
As a simple example: it breaks ad networks, which rely on you having a cookie that is shared across many domains to figure out what ads to show you. That doesn't really work if that 3rd party script is blockd.