We all hate ads, primarily because it is an unethical usage of our data for profits. So, if a person does not want to pay companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft, what alternatives are there to advertise or promote a product or service?
Sure, there are options like posting on online forums, groups and email marketing, but the results do not come anywhere close when compared to paid ads. Are there privacy respecting companies that provides ad placement services? DuckDuckGo uses Microsoft ads, Mojeek didn’t reply and Qwant isn’t available in my country.
Say, I provide a service to a specific type/group of people, what is the most efficient and ethical, and least annoying way to reach them? Say, I own a restaurant or something. How do I attract more customers? I am willing to pay, but to not data-hungry companies.
If paying for the advertisement is an option for you, you can reach out to newspapers and see if they support either contextual ads (based on the article and not on user tracking) or if they allow sponsored articles (if they are truthful and clearly marked as sponsored there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with them).
For some niche areas there might be some alternative ad platform providers without tracking like https://www.ethicalads.io/ which mostly targets developers.