Garrett's thread and the studies in it are often rolled out as evidence that personalised ads perform better and so losing the ability to harvest data that supports personalised ads would be bad for the web
Looking how the data was collected in the studies and where it comes from then Google, FB and other adtech vendors feature strongly (and they can't be considered neutral sources)
In the ad market there are three participants - advertiser, publishers, ad networks.
The last group keep telling us we need them for a health internet, while being completely opaque but making billions creaming off their cut of advertising revenue (there don't seem to be any reliable figures on how much they actually take but an old Guardian study found that sometimes they were getting less than 10% of the revenue the advertiser actually spent - Guardian have brought ad sales in house since)
Alternatives such as category based advertising are often not discussed other than to say 'if personal ads go then the spend is likely to be re-directed towards category based ads'
Even Google while claiming personalised ads are better seems to rely on category based ads for the revenue from search ads (see the CMA report)
IME working alongside various publishers it's often that case that directly sold category based ads are way more profitable for the publishers
Looking how the data was collected in the studies and where it comes from then Google, FB and other adtech vendors feature strongly (and they can't be considered neutral sources)
In the ad market there are three participants - advertiser, publishers, ad networks.
The last group keep telling us we need them for a health internet, while being completely opaque but making billions creaming off their cut of advertising revenue (there don't seem to be any reliable figures on how much they actually take but an old Guardian study found that sometimes they were getting less than 10% of the revenue the advertiser actually spent - Guardian have brought ad sales in house since)
Alternatives such as category based advertising are often not discussed other than to say 'if personal ads go then the spend is likely to be re-directed towards category based ads'
Even Google while claiming personalised ads are better seems to rely on category based ads for the revenue from search ads (see the CMA report)
IME working alongside various publishers it's often that case that directly sold category based ads are way more profitable for the publishers
Given thread like https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1582434737813348352 (and others) I'm deeply skeptical of claims ad tech companies make