A high-level overview of the differences between behavioural and contextual advertising, and some of the (many) advantages of the latter.
I've always felt this was a no-brainer benefit. I remember the days of early online advertising, and the few times those ads worked on me were (in hindsight) all about strong contextual relevance. I wanted to buy certain brands of tech hardware and office equipment because I associated them with specific review sites. The first web host I properly explored purchasing server space with was a regular advertiser on the industry staple A List Apart. I bought my Wacom tablet as a teenager because a webcomic I followed would regularly advertise them, and wouldn't you know it, I wanted to make a webcomic myself. Whereas in the land of behavioural advertising, I'm not sure I can think of a single instance of it truly working.
On the different approaches to online advertising:
Creating profiles about users based on their cookies is called Behavioural Advertising. There's an alternative called Contextual Advertising.
In a nutshell Contextual Advertising looks at the content on the page and allows advertisers to target that, instead of users.
On some of the benefits of removing cookie-based advertising:
With contextual targeting, the publisher would run a single script whenever they create or update content. This means that only once per content change, one script runs and updates one database. Notice this is done on the publisher end, so a user never has to take this cost.
Because no cookies are needed to track the user, this removes a use case for needing a cookie notice.
