The site does NOT directly generate revenue by providing a service to their visitors, nor even by selling space to advertisers. The site generates revenue by s

The site does NOT directly generate revenue by providing a service to their visitors, nor even by selling space to advertisers. The site generates revenue by selling to 3rd parties intimate access to its visitors without the knowledge or consent of the "average" visitor. It is broken in principle, running afoul of the nature of marketplace regulation and privacy rights. This is just "the ends justify the means", because the consequences fall on the visitors, not the site owners, advertisers, or data brokers. It's a disgusting, predatory rationalization for offloading the damage while reaping the rewards. Patreon on its own delivers hundreds of millions of dollars of funding a year. Web ads existed long before individualized tracking, and still are that way in pretty much every other medium (print, billboards, broadcast media, product placement, etc). Independent journalism existed in websites, blogs, pre-monetization youtube, etc as well. Heck, SV investment is available and all about spending money without any real revenue plans anyway. :-P Just this one very particular ad model needs to be ended for everybody, big and small, and the advertising market still has everything else covered. The "big money" sites also still need to monetize somehow (and much more voraciously), and wouldn't be allowed tracking ads, either. If you can't make money without violating your audience, then you don't get to make money at it, and all scales should be held to the same account if it is genuinely considered an issue of rights.