> We may very well reach and pass the point of Peak Advertising without any significant innovation emerging to maintain and grow the flow of revenue supporting the Internet.<p>> What will be left with is a stagnant and ever eroding flow of revenue from the primary sources of advertising, and the inadequate substitution of new forms of advertising in its place. Of the few players that remain, they will produce a web experience that engineers the erosion of user privacy and the blurring of the line between real content and advertising.
What is an "ad" really? There are companies who will pay money for a bit of attention, and companies who get some attention willing to sell it.<p>There will always be a market for selling attention. Always. It's never going away. Attention is a valuable commodity and companies are willing to pay for some.<p>CPMs, CPCs, CPAs... don't matter. There's a budget for ads, and that budget will get spent. Who it goes to and how much attention it buys them will change.<p>When I left the web dev game last year, the big exciting trend was dynamic bidding systems, where many different ad networks would bid to show you an ad in real time. [1]<p>Advertisers are adapting. Publishers are adapting. RTB comes and increases profits and in the end, publishers who adapt do fine.<p>While CPMs for traditional banner ads continue to fall, that just means the market for selling attention has moved on to something else.<p>[1] <a href="https://clearcode.cc/blog/real-time-bidding/" rel="nofollow">https://clearcode.cc/blog/real-time-bidding/</a>
>Someone might develop a behavioral targeting system that perfectly delivers compelling ads
to the right customer flawlessly. The current failure to do so even with massive data about user behavior
seems to discount this scenario.<p>Google and everyone's investment into AI and digital assistants makes a lot more sense.
It's cool to have something to reference when you're talking about peak web advertising. Other than that, the key points as summed up on peakads.org seem plain obvious.