(comments were locked for the blog post)

Whether GA offers an opt-out is moot.
Whether resultant skewed stats wads a webmaster's panties is moot.
WHY a user would exercise his freedom of choice to opt out...

...is a personal matter.

I grouse at the prospect of every Tom, Dick, Harry 3rd-party site MONETIZING the info gleaned as a result of tracking my surfing. Until someone offers to pay me for opted-in participation, screw 'em.

The number and prevalence of 3rd-party embedded content has become ridiculous.
Even via a cable modem connection, pageloads are quite often delayed while the browser waits for all the crap (called from offsite 3rd party sites) to load.

Yes, I can appreciate that if a webmaster cannot monetize his site (his blog etc), he may be disinclined to continue publishing. Yay! Good! Weed out the profit driven self-serving, content-scraping, retweeting, RSS-amalgamating publishers... and the web would be a better place, IMO.

If you publish ORIGINAL content, if you serve ads via OpenX or similar ONSITE delivery mechanism (via your domain, or your blog resides on wordpress.com and wordpress.com hosts the ad media & statskeeping scripts) I won't disturb your ads. If not, expect to continue that your results are skewed. A considerable number of people are fed up & are using NoScript, AdBlockPlus, HTTP and / or DNS proxy/filtering to ensure they steer clear of "all that crap".

ADMINISTRIVIA: when reopening a previously locked forum thread, it pays to link to it, rather than merely allude to its existence with verbose "Re: subject" as you did. Clickable dynamic links being what ultimately distinguishes this medium from traditional, paper-borne ones..... So, was this what prompted you to write?
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/168986.html

[Ie. think of the readers before posting. Otherwise you risk being considered an egocentric, and such are best left to rant unheeded.]

I love you ianf, all of your comments are always so well thought out and really worth reading.

<<I grouse at the prospect of every Tom, Dick, Harry 3rd-party site MONETIZING the info gleaned as a result of tracking my surfing. Until someone offers to pay me for opted-in participation, screw 'em.>>

While that may be true you can always opt out, and who would opt in to such a thing knowing that they don't have to? And then if this were the case how would the site earn money? You're essentially trying to ask to only have to pay for the site if you want to.

I guess that your way of opting in was deciding to go to the site, in the end, you don't have to use it.

James Xuan: Always Ready to Noblesse Oblige. Paraphrasing Norman Mailer, I write to win love and affection of beautiful women (and an occassional James ;-)) Q.E.D.

As for cartouche bubbly's objections, s/he seems to have forgotten the underlying social contract by which we all partake in the Web – as both content creators and consumers: the latter get to read what the former post/ create LARGELY FOR FREE in exchange for agreeing to the hosting sites' [or publishers] general licence to find and implement methods to pay for all that our privilege of reading it for free. I.e. it's hard to complain of others' making hay out of our browsing history, when one is by and large a constant freeloader. Also, contrary to popular "countercultural" belief, being an author/ creator/ publisher in the digital age, is nary a licence to print money. See this for starters:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/one-mans-stand-against-digital-barbarism.ars
http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/03/news-futures-a-whats-next-overview.html