[bserge]

What? They're crazy competitive these days. Every popular ad space online has been bought by the highest bidder. AdWords, Facebook, Imgur, Reddit, companies are dumping cash like mad. The market grew by billions over the past decade.

[adventured]

The ad market basically bifurcated. It's a land of the haves and have nots

The big ad platforms like Facebook and Google have thrived, of course. And as platforms like Snapchat have aged they've gradually improved the rates they're getting for their ad space (a typical process).

The scale of online advertising today isn't because the industry's median or average CPMs went up 100 fold. The volume went up dramatically over the last 10-15 years with the traffic for the big services. The big advertisers brought billion dollar ad budgets online and handed them to Facebook, not to one-click image hosts.

Your typical one-click image host is not going to command better ad rates today vs 15 years ago. It's a worse context than it was back then, actually. Back then advertisers were relatively stupid when it came to online advertising, today they're a lot more sophisticated, and a lot more strict about where they place ads (eg porn on one-click image hosts is a big problem for advertisers). The big, rich platforms like Facebook eat a large share of the high paying advertising. What's left for something like a one-click image host, is very, very low paying ads that you have to run a trillion of to make money.

[MisterBastahrd]

I used to work for a company in a niche industry that used to clear 7 figures a year using the online platform I put together back in its heyday. And while traffic isn't quite as good as it used to be, it's still at about 70%. Their ad revenue is today about 1/8th of what they were making back in 2011-2015ish, and they basically have zero dedicated staff to the platform. I just do some maintenance and bug fixes for them every month.

[icelancer]

Sorry, was confusing.

Ads cost a lot more. People who rent space get a lot less.