Underrated comment. In the old days, car magazines had ads for cars, fishing magazines had ads for fishing gear, food magazines had ads for cooking ware and so on. You can actually have ads tailored after the content of the page you are looking at. You don't have to stalk and track users.

> You can actually have ads tailored after the content of the page you are looking at. You don't have to stalk and track users.

Alas, a lot of the stalking and tracking are measurements. I wrote our own small adserver. We have first party ads, either our own or with smaller partners like stores, that are nothing but HTML, CSS, and images. Fully contextual, no consent required (and so far ad-blocker safe as we are too small).

But everything with the bigger fish (e.g. Sony) goes through agencies who want full control, who clicks, who sees it, etc. The ads are still fully contextutal, but the measurements require all kinds of consent. So we actually hand the TCF string (some kind of shady adtech consent declaration) that our consent tool generates to that adserver because now that decides what they can do… Generally, if someone uses an adblocker or rejects Google Ads (pretty much a canary option as I can’t be arsed to handle the ins and outs of the tcf string), we default to first-party only.

This is why I have no qualms about using an ad blocker on YouTube, but won't use SponsorBlock - if the video creator gets a direct sponsor, I'm happy for them, and if it's a crappy sponsor or a really annoying spot, I can use that as input for how much I trust whatever else the video creator is going to say or whether I will continue to watch their videos.