You can even imagine an alternate reality where the central ad serving entity emerged as pull-based instead of push-based.
Ads can, in theory, serve a useful purpose, informing individuals of products and services which would legitimately make their lives better (e.g., I bought a low-end immersion blender a year or two ago, didn't know they existed too far beforehand, and am quite happy with the ease/safety improvements over any other blending strategy I used to have, especially for bulk and/or hot liquids, especially compared to what I paid and how much space it takes, but without _some_ kind of ad I might never have known about the product (not a perfect example, since I learned about them from a friend, but hypothetically)).
The push-based ad ecosystem has a tacit assumption that people don't want the products and services being sold. That's a mostly true assumption, but instead of the solution being filtering to better products, well-vetted products, avoiding added-cost-without-added-benefit lookalike products, not advertising outright frauds, ..., the industry has opted for more invasive ways of forcing us to watch things we won't ever care about and siphoning invasive tax/healthcare/... information to slightly reduce the miss-rate in ad serving.
That's probably inevitable without regulation (it's cheaper to bully people into watching ads than to improve your ad inventory, with the side benefit that as an ad network you profit when suckers fall for the frauds too, plus it's easier to charge the company making money instead of the end consumer, so a profit-focused company will naturally swim that direction). As an alternative business model though, imagine great search tools on top of a pool of better ad inventory, where you could choose the demographic info and interests you wanted to be considered for a particular search session instead of having that inferred from your browsing history and the raw copies of your paystubs your employer is likely selling.
Ads can, in theory, serve a useful purpose, informing individuals of products and services which would legitimately make their lives better (e.g., I bought a low-end immersion blender a year or two ago, didn't know they existed too far beforehand, and am quite happy with the ease/safety improvements over any other blending strategy I used to have, especially for bulk and/or hot liquids, especially compared to what I paid and how much space it takes, but without _some_ kind of ad I might never have known about the product (not a perfect example, since I learned about them from a friend, but hypothetically)).
The push-based ad ecosystem has a tacit assumption that people don't want the products and services being sold. That's a mostly true assumption, but instead of the solution being filtering to better products, well-vetted products, avoiding added-cost-without-added-benefit lookalike products, not advertising outright frauds, ..., the industry has opted for more invasive ways of forcing us to watch things we won't ever care about and siphoning invasive tax/healthcare/... information to slightly reduce the miss-rate in ad serving.
That's probably inevitable without regulation (it's cheaper to bully people into watching ads than to improve your ad inventory, with the side benefit that as an ad network you profit when suckers fall for the frauds too, plus it's easier to charge the company making money instead of the end consumer, so a profit-focused company will naturally swim that direction). As an alternative business model though, imagine great search tools on top of a pool of better ad inventory, where you could choose the demographic info and interests you wanted to be considered for a particular search session instead of having that inferred from your browsing history and the raw copies of your paystubs your employer is likely selling.