The problem is people who would pay to avoid ads are those worth targeting... I'd love if a single service could let me opt out of all tracking and ads internet wide for a fixed fee, say $50-$100 a month.
How significant would the revenue from these services? I mean, if it's quite significant, doesn't it make sense to offer an "ad-free" plan where they do not track the user and do not show them ads. Only a small portion of their tracking user base would be affected and they would not lose many of the privacy aware users as customers.
It's amazing that it has come to this, but I'd consider paying a fee to eliminate all internet-based advertising and tracking. Even if it just applied to the worst offenders (Facebook, Google, Amazon...) it might be worth it.
Such a system could be easily abused, however, without some kind of bulletproof third-party auditing in place.
If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services (maps, gmail, search, docs, youtube, etc.) I might even consider using it.
$5 for a tracking free Google, including no Google ads on any site? Maybe. But then it would be $5 to any other tracking network and there will probably be some other tracking with no opt out. I'll be still running adblockers and privacy extensions, so paying is pointless.
Isn't this model already relatively heavily used? There are loads of apps that have a free ad supported version, but if you pay for it, all ads are removed.
They could spin it in a similar way:
Ad supported version is free. As part of this free service, you are tracked extensively to build a valuable profile for sale to ad companies.
By paying for the service, all ads and the associated tracking required to make your profile valuable to advertisers is disabled.
In this way, the tracking is spun as a necessary evil for the ad supported model to work.
This would probably require them to be pretty open about what sort of tracking is going on.
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