In my experience surfing the web without adblockers or account containers, the whole "ads of stuff you may want" thing is bogus and has been utterly blown up to justify tracking.

Most Ads fall into a few categories: - in-app ads that target you for known account demographics: those tend to be targeted at simple stereotypes and seldomly actually something i might want - Ads on news websites or blogs that aren't much more targeted than what could be derived from the general interest group / general target audience - And finally, the bulk of all the oh-so-perfectly-targeted ads: are actually mostly just retargeting automations that keep infuriatingly showing you the very things or similar things you just bought for the next few days

I'm yet to discover a product that would have been nice to have via ads

If I want ads, I want ads relevant to what I am doing at the moment. Not for what I bought last week already. Analyse the site the ad is on, not me. Just like the ads on Google search, which created their money printing machine.

I prefer not being tracked and no surveillance by shady companies.

The only "benefit" I see is that I get drowned in bike adds after some research. That's despite the fact that I bought a bike two month ago.

> or ads that actually show you stuff you might want?

It doesn't really matter because it almost never happen. What happens is you get ads for things you either looked out of curiosity or already bought.

Sure, I want ads that are useful to me. That doesn't mean I want a million companies to stalk me online, finding ways to sell me things I don't need.

Tracking ads are almost always trying to sell you something you don't need in ways that you specifically are considered susceptible to. I'm sure there are normal ads out there, but the ones I see are almost always A/B tested and designed to exploit one of my supposed weaknesses. I don't want your psychological warfare but that's what the modern ad landscape has become about.

If I read an article about TVs, I expect ads about TVs. If someone writes a social media post about fridges, I expect ads about fridges. Content-based ad libraries are out there for the people that are interested in the products that are being advertised. On the few websites that use them, I've actually clicked on a few.

Sadly, most of them were stopped by my adblocker anyway because the redirect the ads led to still tried to track me, but in a few cases the system just worked.

If you need to know who I am, where I live, what my gender and age are, how many kids I have, how many pets I have, where I work and where I'm going on holiday this summer in order to sell me something, you don't have anything I want.

I want to have useful search tools to find products when I have a need to fill, rather than being part of a machine to eat the planet's resources as quickly as possible in order to profit a small percentage of people whilst we all die from the effects of GCC.

Two minutes searching for a product on Google or Amazon should disavow anyone of the notion that they have any desire to match products to people that want them.

I had to move some money across EU country lines. I did a handful of searches to research my options, but quickly landed on a regular bank transfer. I was hounded by money transfer service ads for an entire year afterwards, at least the few times I used youtube without an ad blocked. A whole year after I no longer had any need for the service. "Useful" ads have never been useful to me.

C: I'd rather not see the ads at all.

...and this is coming along swimmingly for some aspects of my life.

I use an ad blocker because I prefer to see no ads. I don't see a whole lot of ads generally.

Do you prefer your door-to-door salesman to know the sexual habits of your household and call you by the nickname only your spouse knows about, or not?

I don't want any ads, ever, but if I have to pick, then absolutely I want ads that are completely useless to me. My issue with ads is that they are trying to manipulate me and I think that is morally wrong. This is less likely to succeed if they show me things that I would never buy.