| As someone who also works in an industry tangentially related: * Ad impressions have gone up - its getting easier and easier to launch sites so the absolute number of ads on the internet is definitely going up. That doesn't speak to either side of the 'ads are dying' claims. * CPM rates are more or less going down * As CPM goes down, publishers are looking to recoup their losses, so they use bigger/more invasive ads, and/more ads more . * Again, this leads to 'Ads have increased by a LOT in the last 10 years' * Just because there's a lot of it doesn't necessarily mean it's gotten better. * Native advertising is good and all, but it's out of reach for _a lot_ of people. There's a huge opportunity here to bring quality native advertising to smaller publishers. Maybe there already is, I don't pay too much attention to that specific space. * Even still, it's naive to say that display advertising (banners, mrecs etc) is limited to just porn sites. * Feel free to 'name names' - it's no secret that Adblock Plus has it's Acceptable Ads program https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads * As ads get more invasive and out of control and start to detract from the browsing experience of sites in measurable ways, user's are wanting to take back the control. That's not a scam. Ad Networks and Publishers (at least the larger ones) have clearly brought this problem on themselves by building great products and websites, and then sticking a really shitty ad network on top of it and suck the performance all out of the site. I've measured this directly by disabling ad code on certain sites and seeing a very significant improvement in performance. But instead of trying to understand _why_ users are using adblockers, they're instead just sticking their head in the sand and saying that what they're doing now is the only way forward when clearly it's not. As well, I feel while publishers definitely deserve a lot of this criticism, I'm constantly shocked by how little blame Google and other ad networks get. I get the predicament that smaller publishers are in though. The only way for them monetise their site so it slap Adwords on and call it a day. They see adblockers as a direct assault on them but they can't do anything about it as they have no other way to make money or to improve the quality of the ads. But I think there is a huge opportunity for ad publishers (Google) to accept their responsibility in making the internet better by fixing the reliability and performance of the ads they serve. |