you do not have to track people in order to display ads on the internet, you just incorporate the ad on the webpage, and whoever visits the page sees the ad
Yeah, at a really low CPM. Not trying to justify the awful practice of user tracking, but why would I pay you $3.00 per thousand impressions if you’re going to be showing my ad to demographics that will rarely buy my product?
Companies want to optimize their marketing dollars, so they’re going to pay pennies if you don’t track users.
So why do we let people tell us it can’t be done on the internet?
Precisely.
There is an entire multi-billion dollar industry built upon instilling fear in advertisers that their ads might not be fully "optimized," whatever that means these days. Google is at the head of this list.
Amazingly, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Pepsi, Boeing, and every other large non-tech company managed to become enormous companies by advertising in significantly less targeted ways through newspapers, television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc...
The notion that ads not targeted by Google or Facebook are wasted money is a lie invented by the targeting industry to keep itself in business.
I don’t understand the relevance of that argument in this context.
Computers can cut ads that do tracking out of the page with the same effort they can cut out anything else from the page.
The difference is that ads without tracking remove the incentive for the user to block them. This is why people don’t cut ads out of the newspapers before reading. If the ads in newspapers were cameras, analogous to the tracking used in online advertising, you’d see people expend that effort. Just as you see people blocking ads online.
Plenty of people block ads because the ads themselves are annoying. People don’t cut ads out of paper newspapers because it’s more annoying to do that than it is to just ignore the ads.
It's been tried. What that usually means is you manage the ads yourself, or it's some really small ad network which doesn't have that many advertisers on it competing to give money to the website. Advertisers are as lazy as anyone else, they don't want to have to deal with numerous agencies to deploy ads, they want one, maybe two, and would certainly like it a lot if they had some metrics to show their boss.
