I've put out some feelers for an alternate ad network that I think could do some good, and one of the first traps I ran into is that incentives are not there for the ad network to show us relevant ads. They only care about what the advertiser is willing to pay - Hulu probably COULD show you ads relevant to your life, but the irrelevant pharmaceutical ads pay them more.

I don't know how we get around this. My idea involved an adblocker that tries to let through ads that align with the consumer's long-term goals, with the consumer having the ability to update their preferences in real time, but that's pretty close to facebook's ad model and that's still crap.