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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

I think the physical limitations of paper ended up causing a finite supply of ad space, allowing price of ads to settle. On the internet, there's basically infinite ad space. You can just make your readers keep scrolling, or chop the article into an arbitrary number of pages. With so much potential ad space, someone will budge a little and allow a few more ads to get a bit more revenue, and after everyone does that it snowballs into what we have today.

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I suspect a lot of it comes from the inversion of the ad marketplace.

In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well.

Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.

I have similar feelings about kanban boards and other team-task-trackers. Physical forms are better, because it gets very hard to deal with them when they're too full or overflowing.

I’m increasingly convinced the endgame here is advertisers hiding content within the ads themselves via steganography.

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