Some sites can do that. E.g. Hacker News would easily be able to do targeted advertising without collecting any data because it's a self-selected audience. Even someone like The Verge could probably do a decent job (just advertise games and tech stuff). But what the hell would The New York Times advertise? They're back at TV-style cars and perfume advertising which isn't profitable enough to sustain most businesses.
I think Google's flock was the only serious attempt to solve this, but obviously it got heavily criticised by HN fundamentalists who think that the web should be entirely free and ad-free with zero tracking. To be fair it does have a rather big practical issue in that only Google has any incentive to actually implement it (I don't see why Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple would ever bother).
We're probably stuck with tracking unless the EU gets some sense and mandates a do-not-track style preference system, and actually enforces it with fines.
The downside of this approach is that the publishers don't want to remake their business model, so they make the subscription fee so high that they couldn't possibly ever lose money on people they don't track.
Then even the small part of the population that would consider going through the process of adding yet another subscription to their life either leaves or consents to tracking, because who's going to pay 5 EUR (and Heise is pretty "cheap" compared to some) for access to one article?
I would not be so angry with the concept if the costs, and the effort necessary to pay, was more in line with the income from personalised ads. Pay two cents per view with the push of a button? Sure. Pay 2 EUR for a week of access? Maybe. But so many publications want me to pay almost a print subscription price for any access, clearly showing they don't intend this as a real alternative.
I think Google's flock was the only serious attempt to solve this, but obviously it got heavily criticised by HN fundamentalists who think that the web should be entirely free and ad-free with zero tracking. To be fair it does have a rather big practical issue in that only Google has any incentive to actually implement it (I don't see why Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple would ever bother).
We're probably stuck with tracking unless the EU gets some sense and mandates a do-not-track style preference system, and actually enforces it with fines.