[acrefoot]

I thought street crime was a pretty terrible business for most? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGC2nLnaes

Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...

Some crime has been made pretty unprofitable.

[Nextgrid]

Street crime & bank robbery became a terrible business model because as a society we agree that this kind of crime needs to be stopped/deterred and implemented mitigations (such as making it harder to resell stolen goods, requiring extra documentation for large cash-based transactions, etc).

There's no reason the same couldn't apply to advertising. We could implement (and actually enforce - so unlike the GDPR for example) privacy regulations that would make ad tracking more transparent and give consumers a choice, or repealing Section 230 protections for platforms that take on an publisher role by prioritizing certain content to generate "engagement". These would make advertising less lucrative and let other business models take over.