A lot of what’s funded through ads on the web is garbage the world would be better off without anyway. For the rest, I don’t think there’s a single silver bullet answer. We can’t take the world as it exists today and swap out ads for something less harmful without other changes in the landscape. A world without a surveillance driven internet would look very different to the one we have today in far more ways than just the lack of ads.

Unfortunately momentum is hard to overcome, and even with a good monetization strategy for a single product it’s impossible to shift the market without also trying to more broadly shift consumer behavior to make the current state less profitable and to push the industry to more collectively and broadly searching for alternatives.