If you view it from a game theory perspective, both the ad business (your Google's and Facebook's) are subject to the same incentives as your Flattr's. At the

If you view it from a game theory perspective, both the ad business (your Google's and Facebook's) are subject to the same incentives as your Flattr's. At the core of both of them is an economic transaction (direct dollars vs. ad impression), both of which use personal data like web history (to know which article has been "bought"). The big difference is the ad supported model is not linked to your bank account, and has some pseudonymous properties, but there is still the classic three-party structure of reader, publisher and platform, and still the huge pressure to be profitable. 1) So you're still having your personal web history tracked by a technology company, possibly even worse because it's linked to your bank 2) Economic pressures and incentives are roughly the same 3) End result is your data will eventually get sold anyway, much the same way that cable companies always introduced ads I also have a belief but no hard data that advertisers pay more per impression than consumers ever will, which leads to this cycle happening in the first place. People seem to forget that the internet wasn't really profitable until targeted advertising, cutting that would mean the end of most web technology companies.