Advertising currently provides most of the revenue for many Internet sites. Until another major revenue source comes along a significant effort will still be put towards optimizing advertising.
Yeah I know... It's even worse than that actually, since advertising is not a zero sum game (if you have two companies with 50% market share, they will get less compared to a company with all the market), any alternative would just decrease significantly the value of advertising and therefore, no alternative can emerge.
That is why there is no option to pay for Google services instead of the tracking. I don't think there is any solution to this, unless the share of AdBlock users would reach a tremendous level.
Thats interesting, but it just seems like mining additional money out of people, they still get to keep all the data even if they are not displaying the advertising.
