[mwsherman]

The insight here, which the writer doesn’t get to, is the incredible economic inefficiency all of this implies.

Ineffective ads outnumber good ads by at least an order of magnitude, conservatively. By good I mean “delivering economic value”, which might take the form of clickthroughs or general brand awareness.

If we consider clicked ads, or those that eventually result in a purchase, to be good ones, then the rest are a waste.

That waste should be understood as a degradation of the publisher’s product. We go to great lengths to get the typography and design just so – and then allow an economically worthless ad to degrade it.

The opportunity is to improve ads by an order of magnitude. This isn’t a question of eking out slightly better targeting. It means not showing an ad at all, most of the time.

Though the evidence to date is not in my favor, I have to believe that the current state of web advertising is waiting for the bottom to fall out, like print media in the last decade.