For better or worse, advertising pays for the salaries of the people who write the stories and build the websites and apps that people use. The goal is not to remove ads altogether but to improve display advertising so that it is a positive improvement to a site rather than the negative effect that it has on user experience today (yes, advertising can be positive addition to content - ask anyone who reads Vogue magazine).
Google won search advertising because ads were relevant, looked good, and it was simple for advertisers to reach the users they wanted. The major reason for Google's success is because they owned every piece in the advertising stack:
- The content (e.g. google.com) - The adserver - The auction engine - Fraud detection (Google's quality team's success at removing fraud meant that advertisers trusted that their messages were reaching users) - Creative adserver (e.g. text ads and creatives are served by Google)
In display advertising, each of these pieces is operated by a different party. This means that integration between each of the pieces is not a tight, giving users and advertisers a low quality experience. Here are some of the effects of this:
1. Ads generally cannot be tailored to the website where they run. Publishers do not have the ability to tailor ads to work within their environment like they can with Google Adsense (native advertising is starting to change this though) - so most websites look bad with display ads.
2. There is massive data leakage from ads. Because a 3rd party adserver is serving the ad on a publisher site, it is nearly impossible for publishers to keep their customer data from leaking to everyone in the ad stack, which quickly becomes everybody in the ad industry.
Because ad networks that buy the publisher ad space from a publisher almost never actually serve the ad creative (they just serve an ad tag to another network), a massive circle of redirects where a single ad can be bought and sold over 100 times before an ad is displayed. This means that the publisher is giving their customer data to 100 companies before they get an ad on a page.
3. There is no industry wide coordinated ad fraud effort that is successful. There are so many ways for ad fraud to occur in many different parts of the ad stack, that a single company that tries to reduce fraud from a single point in the ad stack will only have limited success.
4. Ad creative does not have rigid controls where the publisher can let the advertiser know what can and cannot be done on their site. This means that either an ad seems to 'take over' the publisher page without adding to the user experience, or an ad is reduced to a backup image, which is not a pleasing experience.
A reduced set of advertising features needs to be done much better in order for display advertising budgets grow from where they are now.