A half-way house which could be interesting to explore would be to make advertising “static” again, i.e. all visitors to a given page see the same ads, or at le

A half-way house which could be interesting to explore would be to make advertising “static” again, i.e. all visitors to a given page see the same ads, or at least one of the same ad-rotation with the same probability distribution. The intrusiveness and complexity mostly seem to come from targeting ads against visitors rather than page content. There are still a few sites which run simple static “someone paid us and we edited in a link using notepad” style ads. Frankly, they’re higher quality and more likely to be relevant than anything that comes through the big ad-targeting networks. (I’d vaguely hoped GDPR might have this effect. In fact, it just seems to mean business as usual with a slightly increased floor on the amount of process and bureaucracy...)