Advertising does not require tracking. Remember over the air television and all it’s free news broadcasts.
To some degree that is how ads worked in print: In a magazine about horseback riding you will find ads about riding equipment, as readers are into that while reading.
And yet whenever I buy anything online I'm inundated with ads for said item. In fact I almost wish there were an officially sanctioned/ standardised way of updating your status as a tracked user on various products you might be interested in or have in fact now purchased with no need to buy another soon. As it is I still see ads for baby formula on YouTube despite having had no need to purchase it for over 16 years (and I honestly would expect Google should know that about me, though when I ask Google Assist how old my children are it refuses to tell me...)
Google don't need to follow local law and regulations.
Google don't need to employ people to verify content or take legal responsibility.
Google can track users and thus categorize users in much more fine details than television and news papers ever could. A magazine about horseback riding might have a vague idea about who their readers are, but google can find out that a pregnant teenage girl has yet to tell her parents.
News was hit or miss. They did a lot of serious investigative reporting, but newspapers where simply a better medium for personalized in depth coverage.
Case in point: Here's Jay Leno interviewing Elon Musk about SpaceX Starship for network television [1] vs YouTuber Tim Dodd [2]. Leno's program is fine for people who don't follow space. For my niche Dodd is vastly better, but he can't draw a wide enough audience to make money on non-targeted ads like Leno can.
And the thing is, everyone has their niches. There is no large population of people out there who are average in every way and need the network television version of everything. The average person doesn't exist.
Now, you can quibble about how much targeting increase revenue but the funny thing about total advertising is it’s fairly consistent through time. Tracking failed to significantly increase worldwide advertising spend, it only redirects it.
Dodd simply couldn't have a network television show with this kind of content. It wouldn't come close to making sense. If he did a network television show it would have to be a lot different, almost certainly in a direction that would make it less interesting for me personally.
My argument has nothing to do with global ad spend, that's a red herring. The key is how those ad dollars get distributed. Targeted advertising makes niche content viable in a way that non-targeted advertising can't match.
The only difference is relative pricing, but again the global population and global advertising spend doesn’t depend on tracking so if it was banned little would actually change.
> The only difference is relative pricing
... the relative pricing difference is the whole difference I'm talking about. Without targeted advertising niche content makes less money, general audience content makes more. So you agree with me that this is true. Then you say that this is a small change. I say it has enormous effects on the content that gets produced. Honestly, this is transparently obvious.
Just look at how much YouTube content is sponsored via an Ad inside the video. That isn’t tied to your personal history.
If I manufacture say jigsaw puzzles and I can’t target individuals then I want to link to show up on a YouTuber with puzzle related content. But with tracking I shouldn’t care about the videos content as much and should be happy to show up on cat videos as long as tracking supports the association. That same logic would seemingly extend to any activity with associated products which is basically everything.
On the other hand soda manufactures are presumably less picky and could advertise on both.
We could continue to make up just-so stories about the effects of targeting on niche content. But I doubt we would convince each other. Is there any research on this topic?