[IshKebab]

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.

[chgs]

Fairly sure the New York Times carried adverts for decades before computers existed

[IshKebab]

Have you somehow forgotten that physical newspapers cost money? They weren't funded solely by advertising.