Theory of Peak Advertising and the Future of the Web (2013)
peakads.org
peakads.org
> What will be left with is a stagnant and ever eroding flow of revenue from the primary sources of advertising, and the inadequate substitution of new forms of advertising in its place. Of the few players that remain, they will produce a web experience that engineers the erosion of user privacy and the blurring of the line between real content and advertising.
There will always be a market for selling attention. Always. It's never going away. Attention is a valuable commodity and companies are willing to pay for some.
CPMs, CPCs, CPAs... don't matter. There's a budget for ads, and that budget will get spent. Who it goes to and how much attention it buys them will change.
When I left the web dev game last year, the big exciting trend was dynamic bidding systems, where many different ad networks would bid to show you an ad in real time. [1]
Advertisers are adapting. Publishers are adapting. RTB comes and increases profits and in the end, publishers who adapt do fine.
While CPMs for traditional banner ads continue to fall, that just means the market for selling attention has moved on to something else.
Google and everyone's investment into AI and digital assistants makes a lot more sense.