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Thanks to data collection and aggregation, the ads are targeted better, and thanks to that, the sites are earning more, and thanks to that, small scale content

Thanks to data collection and aggregation, the ads are targeted better, and thanks to that, the sites are earning more, and thanks to that, small scale content creation is a viable career. Now that ad revenue will be most definitely cut down to almost zero, a whole sector of small content creators will be destroyed and move to centralized platforms such as Facebook will be encouraged (because only on centralized platforms enough data can be collected in order to properly target ads, because that is the only remaining way how to have at least some audience and because it's free).

Firadeoclus 9y ago
What is your reason to believe ad revenue would drop to almost zero? Revenue might be lower. That is not in itself proof of a worse outcome. Maximising numbers like revenue or GDP is not good per se. Neither is maximising the amount of content created. If you want to know the trade-off is worth it you also have to look at the costs. The impact of tracking on privacy is not zero. The impact of ever more attention grabbing ads is not zero. The impact of persuading us to buy ever more stuff is not zero. Also, the vast majority of small scale content creators are hobbyists.