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Having consulted in the adtech space, let me make some counterpoints: First, ad growth is fueled entirely by mobile at this point; non-mobile ad revenue has flatlined despite continued growth in non-mobile content consumption. Second, while we can "track and measure [consumers] much better," this is based on a combination of walled-garden ad networks (GOOG and FB, specifically) plus a series of ever-more-intrusive tracking technologies that essentially subvert consumers' own applications, and many of which are susceptible to better endpoint privacy and security technologies and practices. (And there's a non-negligible regulatory and statutory risk to a lot of tracking practices inherent to modern DMPs, too.) Third, while the loss of revenue for content producers is a critical issue, ad exchanges are themselves responsible as a first-order cause of ad blockers. Publishers' ever-increasing need for demand and the need for AXs to hit fill rate targets means that all sorts of demand-side crap -- not just spam, but phishing and malware vectors -- makes advertising actively dangerous to consumers. (Remember when Forbes forced users to turn off their adblockers, then immediately started serving malware?) Unless AXs figure out how to deal with the quality issue on the demand side, adblockers are a security, not a convenience, issue. One can be concerned by the potential conflict of interest in adblockers' whitelisting, but at least they generally seem to have fairly objective standards. The fact that those standards are antithetical to current adtech practices is, for them, a feature, not a bug. More generally, the lack of transparency in terms of what data is collected on consumers, and how it's being collected, will continue to be a concern until meaningful and transparent standards are devised, enforced, and communicated. Until that happens, adtech will continue to be a watchword for anti-consumer, anti-privacy practices. |