[HerraBRE]

This is still a muddled view of things.

In pay-for-click, advertisers are paying for advertising which is effective. The click is how that is measured.

There are other ways to measure effectiveness, but measuring clicks is simple and reliable. No matter how you do it, advertisers ultimately want to pay for ads that work and lead to sales.

Everything else is a means to an end, targeting in particular. Ineffective advertising is a worthless waste of money, no matter how well targeted it is. Untargeted advertising which leads to sales on the other hand, is very valuable.

So sure, advertisers will prefer targeted advertising. But that's because they expect it will work better than the alternative. What matters to them is whether it works, not how.

To the general public the how is critical though. If there was less tracking and spying and data harvesting we'd all be better off. So it's very important to squash the misunderstanding that tracking and targeting itself has intrinsic value for anyone. For society (and for the ad networks), tracking has a significant cost and is in many ways a significant liability. For advertisers it's a tool in their toolbox, and if we could replace it with a more benign one, that'd be good for everyone.