[enkiv2]

The deluge of invasive advertising in web content (along with tracking and various shades of borderline-malware) is symptomatic of late capitalism optimizing for profit: the web is almost unusable without ad-blockers, and yet alternative monetization models are not being seriously persued, because Google has no reason to optimize for anything other than ads even though they are never being seen. People pay for advertising despite it being almost completely ineffective (advertising, as far as we can tell, is slightly more effective than priming -- in other words, it is effective only in the highly suggestible, and then only slightly and only when it's well-targeted), and middle-men build infrastructure for distributing advertising content that at best will clog up the tubes and be ignored but that in the average case will be explicitly blocked (before or after loading). No party involved has a really good reason to move to something effective -- those doing the advertising are not doing it because they believe it to be effective but because they are expected to, and sites that display the ads do so because they have nothing to lose and a few cents to gain per page-load on whichever users happen to not be running adblock.

There are real alternatives. Micropayments based on reuse (much like publishing royalties), for instance, could simultaneously produce a good income source for creatives and an incentive to invert the chilling effects on transformative reuse created by the automatic conservative enforcement of DMCA safe-harbor policies; a nuanced model for this kind of system is described in several places as 'transcopyright'. Schneier's street-artist model has been adapted into the model used by Patreon, but is remarkably rare in practice for an idea by a major thinker that was published 20 years ago. And, of course, there's stuff like crowdfunding and selling t-shirts -- both of which have issues of their own (kickstarter-style crowdfunding is more sensitive to bad actors than either the street-artist model or Patreon's hybrid version that turns crowdfunding into a subscription model; hawking merch can turn off certain communities and may not be useful outside of communities with a strong and coherent identity with symbol-sets that uniquely identify it).

Advertising was jumped on as a monetization model because it's, at small-scale, low-effort. Google makes their money by keeping the effort the same for the other two parties (the ad-seller and the ad-buyer) while improving targeting. However, the targeting hasn't really scaled well, despite the amount of tracking going up. And, we've hit the point where the tracking intended to improve the targeting has gotten so resource-heavy that end-users would rather cut it off entirely than benefit from well-targeted ads -- we've hit a scaling limit. The effort of targeting the advertising has been pushed off to Google and to the end user in terms of bandwidth. So, unless everybody gets fiber and significantly faster computers suddenly, we have time to back-track and find something that doesn't clog the pipes with surreptitiously-collected data worth on the order of one cent per megabyte.