The issue is with the user tracking and mutual trust. If you write an article about cars, it should be possible to find companies your readers might be interes

The issue is with the user tracking and mutual trust. If you write an article about cars, it should be possible to find companies your readers might be interested in, and embed it on the page, served from your same domain or CDN. You can track the views easily just by looking at the CDN request log and the click-trough with some javascript. Your ad customer can track the number of click-trough by looking at the referrer field. If that was the case then your ads probably wouldn't get blocked. Privacy advocates wouldn't have too much issue because the data collection is limited to your website. There is no (a) or (b) choice here, you can still have ads. Just without all the user tracking. The issue is that the advertisers don't trust your reporting. They want a more fluid relationship where they don't have to build a rapport with your website. Everything needs to be automated away. And for that to work the only way is to also track the users on the website. Then add a bit of greediness and gain Internet-wide user tracking. Perpetuating that idea that ads either should exist as they are, or that the evil "paid content" will grow is playing the game of the advertisers. It's a false dichotomy because other solutions exist.