Update: Mint’s website doesn’t actually seem to be using Adsense. It might be a mention that hasn’t been removed from the privacy policy.
The Linux Mint website uses google Adsense to sell your browsing data to google so they can better track your preferences and deliver personalized ads…
They state they do it for the money. Pretty scammy from my opinion. They should remove all the google things from their website (including analytics) and use their own solution instead.
Source: https://www.linuxmint.com/privacy.php
Google Adsense
Authorized third parties such as Google Adsense place cookies as described in our Cookies Policy. We use this information to serve you certain advertising content.
Advertising
We use Google Adsense to provide advertising and help fund our project.
On all websites using Adsense, including Linux Mint’s, Google use cookies to track your web activity and to guess what commercial products you’re most likely to be interested in. This information is then used by Adsense to provide personalized adverts to you.___
You could also donate to them to the tune of the revenue that they get from advertising.
Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean that it’s free or without cost to the publisher.
You can choose to go elsewhere or block the advertising if you feel strongly about it.
It actually keeps me from donating to them…
Similarly, they don’t expose the donation amounts from other means than PayPal…
Well then, good news, you can use another distro or not even donate. I use #LMDE