Privacy Analysis of FLoC

Not quite. Publishers are paid in BAT by consumers that choose to do so. Consumers can earn BAT by watching ads, or by purchasing it directly and (hopefully?) avoiding ads. See [1].

I haven't tried it myself, and it's had its share of controversy[2], so it's not a perfect implementation, but certainly a prototype of more user respecting business model.

The idea is that the transaction should be a conscious decision initiated by the user. Not something that is forced upon them by stealing their attention from the content they're actually interested in to focus on product placements that might be--but often are not--relevant to their interests. Then you add the intrusive UI changes some sites adopt to show ads, the pervasive tracking and shady practices, and I can't understand how someone outside of the advertising industry would defend it.

The solution is not smarter and more relevant interests ads, nor simple text based "promise, no tracking" ads. The solution is a reversal of the business model and putting the user in charge of how, what they pay with, and to whom. You know, like it works in the real world when you purchase something. Yes, this would be a financial hit to a lot of companies and the advertising industry, but it seems like a good alternative to these hostile practices that are ruining the internet. What with the constant cookie consent forms and pervasive advertising the web has become increasingly annoying and hostile to use. We should fight to fix that.

For all its shortcomings Brave Inc. is attempting to change this, and we should applaud and promote that. Unfortunately unless the big tech firms adopt similar models, this is unlikely to have mass adoption. And like I said, they have no incentives to do so.

As for answering your question, I'm not paid to come up with user respecting business models for companies. :) But off the top of my head, they could try donations, merchandise, "pro" subscription plans (free for everyone, advanced features for paying users; just don't be crippleware/nagware), or an entirely paid-only model. Yes, it wouldn't be as lucrative and "easy" as ads, but there doesn't have to be a single source of revenue.

[1]: https://basicattentiontoken.org/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...

My bet is that all the fancy ML is useless because the sellers are not adapted to the buyers. They want to sell X and buyers need/want to buy Y. If they used proper targeting they would reach a much smaller audience.

So they have an order to show 1000 crappy flash drive ads, but you only want to buy other things - what are they going to do? Skip you? No, that's money lost. They will show you the ad even if it is ineffective. Greed explains the bad targeting.