I work in ad-tech too, so I'm not judging you. The donations you've made are awesome, and I can see you've clearly thought a lot about how to best direct your money. But I think you're missing a few downsides.
The digital marketing/analytics industry doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about how to secure all that data they're collecting, and data breaches are happening more and more frequently. A lot of this data is supposedly anonymized, but often can be tied back to identifying information.
I would consider Google to be an exception here, as they have some of the best security people in the world working for them. But they are just that: an exception. Don't forget that the industry that Google enables is a lot less ethical (and a lot less competent) than Google itself.
There are other downsides too (e.g. the impact of advertising on editorial integrity, and the ethics of using political ads to tip the scales in an election).
> If you hate the direction of this industry, consider paying for shit that you consume
I work at a very large bank. We make money by through account fees and interest charges, but we still do all the sleazy tracking and analytics that you would expect from a company with a you-are-the-product business model. We work closely with ad networks so that we can get demographic data about who our users are. And in return, we share/leak our customers' (anonymized and bracketed) income.
This is now done through first-party tracking, so you won't see it if you look in the network tab in DevTools.
Why do we do this? Because it helps us target our marketing to an individual's demographics. Yes we make money through other ways, but this helps us make even more money. That's how businesses operate, and I don't think that companies like mine are uncommon.
Thinking that paying for shit will let you avoid tracking is like thinking that paying for cable TV will let you avoid ads. Companies will do whatever they can to make an extra buck on top of the money they're already taking from you.
Ad/tracker blockers are useless. Short of creating legislation to stop it, the only way to stop this tracking is to fuck with the data enough that it's no longer worth mining.
If you don't need the money, if it's just an extra buck, then it's easier to put pressure, as you know it wont kill them. Like most people would be scared of the collateral damage from pushing too hard against ads if newspapers, that are pretty important for society, would take too big of a hit.
The digital marketing/analytics industry doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about how to secure all that data they're collecting, and data breaches are happening more and more frequently. A lot of this data is supposedly anonymized, but often can be tied back to identifying information.
I would consider Google to be an exception here, as they have some of the best security people in the world working for them. But they are just that: an exception. Don't forget that the industry that Google enables is a lot less ethical (and a lot less competent) than Google itself.
There are other downsides too (e.g. the impact of advertising on editorial integrity, and the ethics of using political ads to tip the scales in an election).