[Varqu]

While I agree with the post author on the "if I pay the subscription then there should be no ads" part, there is a bit that comes fairly often in such posts which I find rather funny: "sell my data to your advertisers"

Sorry, that's not how 90% of digital advertising works. The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen based on some specific profiling.

But these ads companies don't receive a file called "Manuel Moreale personal data and shopping history"

[ale42]

> The company doesn't sell your data, they just offer some other companies to put an ad in front of your screen

True, but the result is the same. I would have nothing against _some_ static ads (like in newspapers) even if I'm paying to read articles, but they should be served directly by the website, not by an external ad aggregator. Just check with how many companies data is shared on the cookie banner details: on the newspaper I'm paying for, it's "us and our 105 partners". So I feel totally justified to run an adblocker here. It's not ok that other companies should know which articles I'm reading, for how long, or things like that, so they can better target me with ads, especially that it's not limited to the website of the newspaper. In addition, you often get very annoying ads, with fast animations that are very distracting if you are reading text nearby.

[oneeyedpigeon]

This is absolutely the most reasonable compromise. I don't really understand how advertising survives as it is, but static ads feel like a win-win.

[stkdump]

It isn't. Targeted ads are much more valuable, to the point that fully random ads have almost no value at all. Btw. you can tell. If you regularly delete cookies you get much fewer ads. They like to say that if you don't allow/keep cookies, you get the same amount of ads, just less relevant. But that just isn't the case.

If browsers had the functionality to only preserve cookies that are needed to stay logged in across sessions, that would be quite powerful. That is all the cookies I need.