[jordo37]

I am a little confused about your doubt that advertising funds the web, especially the published web (vs web-apps). Can you expand on this point?

To be transparent, I am the CTO of Perfect Audience, an advertising startup that does retargeting, which does use tracking to show users ads for sites / products they have previously looked for. These ads are worth more than non-data driven ads and make more money for publishers than non-data driven ads bought via bidding, which is where most advertising is moving today.

[betterunix]

Well, I won't deny that some websites are funded by advertising (Google comes to mind). On the other hand, there are a large number of websites that are ad-free, ranging from small personal blogs (which have low hosting fees; I know people who pay a tiny amount for EC2 to host their blog) to websites with millions of pageviews per day (e.g. Wikipedia). We had a world wide web before we had web advertising; somehow, people were able to pay for things back then.

Really though, my word choice was poor. What I should have said is that I doubt the necessity of advertising to fund the web, citing the examples above.

Also, sorry if I am attacking your company. It's nothing personal.