> You are wrong, ads only waste people's time.
This, along with your focusing entirely on online ads, leads me to believe you failed to understand my comment, or at least what the purpose of it was.
> A better service would be one where consumers pay with money to ask a service for the best recommendation of a product by an independent company.
That's a different way. It may or may not be better, depending on the service and and category, and how much money you have. One possible downside is that you need to know what you're looking for. A simple example of this is movie trailers. I used to see a lot of them, and I enjoyed knowing what movies were coming out later. A few years back I dropped cable, and only use a few online streaming services now. I remember once every 6-12 months to look at movie trailers on Hulu, otherwise I really only hear about stuff from word of mouth or from some interest site that is excited about it. Entire movies come and go that I never hear of now. Is that better? I don't particularly think so. I liked the exposure of movie trailers. Could some trailers be played too much and be annoying? Yes. Do I think the entire lack of them is a better? For me, no.
> Furthermore there are multiple other ways to make revenue online that don't involve ads
I'm not defending the current online ad industry. I'm trying to lay down a framework that leads to a solution that works better, by trying to re-frame the conversation on the actual problem elements instead of what happens so often, which is attacking symptoms and letting the actual problem surface somewhere else, just as bad if not worse. Attacking ads will not stock tracking, it will stop ads that track you. If you care about tracking and privacy, fight against tracking and for privacy, and the problematic ads will be forced to change as well, but at least they won't just shift to real world ads that track you, or other uses of tracking people for monetization that are even worse than advertising.