What is the best way for the consumer internet to interact with businesses?

Consumer identifies a need, they search for businesses that offer product or service that addresses the need; go to their page and make a trade. Simple. No ads. Just make sure your service can be found and that you provide enough information for consumer to make a choice.

This is in contrast to today: the business identifies a need, they find vulnerable people who they can potentially convince that they have the need that this business addresses already and sell it to them.

I’d say that from a user standpoint ads that are based on the page/site content are ideal, but from a business standpoint the drop in revenue (comparatively) by moving to such a model at scale makes it a non-starter (just a guess, no data to back it up).

More speculation: I wouldnt think this drop in revenue is due to quality of the ads themselves but rather how it limits the scope - if we’re no longer serving ads to the individual across websites then this makes the number of times their profile is sold/profited off of fewer.

Contextualized advertising gets my vote, though I’m sure there are other alternatives.

How should businesses owners gather market intelligence on their potential customers? How should potential customers signal their interest in new products?

The way I see it, this is not my concern. I know the ad business keeps a lot of content mills afloat, but I’m not particularly enamored with how that has turned out.