Ghostery makes/made its money selling things like a report on what advertising ends up being on your site, which you as site owner might quite reasonably want to know. (Advertising space is sold and resold at dizzying speed.)
IIRC Ghostery recently sold itself to Cliqz, which in turn is owned by Burda, a publishing conglomerate. Mozilla owns a bit too.
Yes, looks like they are now owned by some other company. Previously, one of many references [1] said this, which really smells fishy to me(Now not sure if the article itself is wrong):
"Ghostery is owned by Evidon, a company that collects and provides data to advertising companies. It has a feature called GhostRank that you can check to "support" them. The problem is, Ghostery blocks sites from gathering personal information on you—but Ghostrank will take note the ads you encounter and which ones you block, and sends that information back to advertisers so they can better formulate their ads to avoid being blocked. The data is anonymous, and Ghostery still does everything it promises to do to protect your privacy."
Seems logical - if you're an advertising company or an organized group of advertising companies and you know that people are going to be doing ad-blocking or at least tracker-blocking, if you can provide a tool that's 90% of the way there which also gets you metrics, etc. then at least you get that little bit of data and the existence of a "good enough" option may also delay stronger measures implemented by someone else.
That assumes that ghostery users block some ads, not all.
Try this alternative: The reports sold by ghostery tell example.com the link targets and reseller chains for each ad on its site, so it can keep away the ads for herbal viagra or fake gucci clothes. (Ad space is often sold through resellers, I've seen five-reseller chains myself and have heard stories about longer ones.)
Ghostery makes/made its money selling things like a report on what advertising ends up being on your site, which you as site owner might quite reasonably want to know. (Advertising space is sold and resold at dizzying speed.)
IIRC Ghostery recently sold itself to Cliqz, which in turn is owned by Burda, a publishing conglomerate. Mozilla owns a bit too.