GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB

https://github.com/michael-lazar/rtv

I think there needs to be a movement to bring the WWW back to basic, readable, low-JS, animation-free, content-based sites.

Same thing with cookies.

On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.

Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.

Serving ads requires exactly:

1) The HTML tag.

2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the tags.

3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image.

That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers very much did not like it because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model).

And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle.

The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single tag in your website, no other work on your part").

And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more "significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated, behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine "relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some reason.

So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.

Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc.

Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests.

A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it.

The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...