There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.

For example, the paper magazine "Small Craft Advisor" recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn't take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.

Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. "Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business."

[–] Hypersapien@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is a site I am familiar with that was determined to not have intrusive ads and actually created a side business of creating ads for its advertisers that it would find acceptable on the site, which consisted of a still image of given dimensions, and a link.

When you say no data collection, you mean no personalized data collection, right? Obviously they would want to know how many times the ad was clicked.

[–] jadero@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

That sounds like the kind of thing I envision.

Yes, no personalized data collection. Both sides of the ad transaction would need to track something if the placement had some kind of impressions or click-through payment system. It's been a while since I've managed a website, but I think most of that can be handled with pretty basic logging that has existed since before micro-targeted advertising was even conceived.

For a simple placement contract like we have with what few newspapers remain, the ad supplier could assess the value of the placement for themselves using standard referrer logs. Not paying its way? Don't renew the placement.