> I don't particularly like the ads, but I understand they are needed to sustain many businesses (either online or elsewhere.) Would I prefer alternative payment methods? Maybe, depending on the publisher, and the price of the content.

The problem is not the ads but the way it is produced (Behavioral ads). The issue is always behavioural ads and not contextual ads. Duckduckgo has been profitable for so long with contextual ads. And not to mention, contextual ads which doesn't depend on lucrative data practices and privacy invasive tech has been proven to be much more effective than behavioural ads. Good read on it - [1][2].

Also, how is reactive ads (behavioural ads) useful to a user? Just think for a sec. Unless they are listening to everything you say which is ludicrous levels of privacy violation practice followed Google, FB and Amazon RIGHT NOW... behavioural ads are useless to many many topics and use cases. By the time you get a behaviour based ad, you would have stopped looking for it, found the item. And even when they are fast enough, after many hurdles of being reactionary, THE AD NEEDS TO APPEAL to the person. This again ignores the fact that users don't buy stuff based on behaviours but based on ratings and reviews from Yelp, Amazon, youtube reviewers and other influencing factors like ME! I am the tech nerd who helps my entire family and friends with purchases on electronic items like smartphones, computers and other items. And I know how to teach people to buy things by going through reviews and what not. Nothing I do is in favour of Behavioural ads. Meanwhile just by being proactive, contextual ads are more likely to be more appealing to user cos it depends on NOT YOUR BEHAVIOUR but behaviour of everyone who have searched the term/item. This means the ads are tested to work on more people IMO.

Also, behavioural ads miss the point that humans have strong opinions on things. But also that humans change their opinions from time to time. I might move from iOS to Android or vice versa. Behavioural ads also miss that a lot of the purchases are rare purchases and once in a life time purchases. So reactive ads based on my behaviour could be useless. Sure, you might be able to sell something based on this particular rare purchase. But why risk the resources wastage, data privacy and data breaches? This is not in favour of the user at all. Contextual ads are more effective in all the above scenarios than behavioural ads.

Behaviour data is not that effective to SELL ADS. But you can offset all these risks and ineffectiveness by selling your data to thousands of third parties or governments even. THE DATA ECONOMY MAKES BEHAVIOURAL ADS SUSTAINABLE. The data economy needs to stop. That is it. NOT ads. Ads have been present in media and everywhere else long before Google was there, nobody was up and arms about them, were they? They were annoying, yes. But not threatening like it is now.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/facebook-google-p...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-... (Thanks user iou)

PS: Writing this as a separate response (Instead of a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29357427) cos I don't want this to be tucked away from other users. There will be more people who sympathise with ads but miss the point of behavioural ads vs contextual ads.