Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the evidence? This article? That's not the reason why, the whole EU market is down and there are just fewer but larger ad campaigns which go to the sites with the biggest reach. It's regulation causing consolidation.
The GDPR is a great piece of legislation, that significantly improves people's privacy. Your arguing about how terrible it is will not convince anybody that your industry's practices aren't evil. They will only reinforce it.
I'm one of the few in the industry who actually spent time and money on regulation. I've met with Senators and major CMOs to make it happen. It's not that simple. GDPR has good intent but is poorly executed and has no measurable effect on privacy because those politicians fail to understand the market they're regulating. This is now playing out again in the recent copyright directives.
Marketing and advertising are drivers of the economy and there's nothing inherently wrong with either of them. All regulation also creates and solves problems, one of which is consolidation. Nothing inherently problematic in that either. Targeted advertising definitely needs fixing, but that's separate from privacy and there are ways to do both while also solving for other issues like fraud, political influence, mass surveillance, and more.
"Evil, harmful, just dies" are useless for discussion. I suggest dropping the immature rhetoric if you actually want to have a productive conversation and perhaps create the change you want to see.