As this excellent article points out, lots of research shows that most online advertising is a waste of money, due to phenomena such as targeting people who are already looking for the advertised product or service:<p>> <i>Picture this. Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria." It’s plain to see that junior’s no marketing whiz.</i><p>Alas, the incentives everywhere are stacked <i>in favor of wasting money</i>:<p>> <i>Within the marketing department, TV, print and digital compete with each other to show who’s more important, a dynamic that hardly promotes honest reporting. The fact that management often has no idea how to interpret the numbers is not helpful either. The highest numbers win.</i><p>> <i>"Bad methodology makes everyone happy,” said David Reiley, who used to head Yahoo’s economics team and is now working for streaming service Pandora. "It will make the publisher happy. It will make the person who bought the media happy. It will make the boss of the person who bought the media happy. It will make the ad agency happy. Everybody can brag that they had a very successful campaign."</i><p>Moreover, the online advertising complex has evolved mechanisms for 'manufacturing' more demand for online advertising, for example, by relying on zero-sum games like "crowding out" in which <i>no one wins except the online advertising complex</i>:<p>> <i>If, for example, BestBuy was the only buyer for "BestBuy" search ads, brand name advertising would only lead to a mere 2% to 3% additional clicks. More than nothing, but it is hardly enough to warrant the investment. But there was one group of advertisers with a valid reason to purchase own brand name ads. Not that they were any more effective for this group, but because their competitors were "crowding them out" by buying ads that targeted the brand owner's name (so you search for "Bestbuy" but a sponsored ad for "Walmart" tops the list). This can enable Walmart to steal 20% of Bestbuy's organic search traffic.</i><p>In the aggregate, all this wasteful advertising feeds a quarter-trillion-dollar "industry" that seems to add little or no value to anyone, and may in fact subtract significant value from everyone's quality of life. Is it a "bubble?" I don't know. Is it a net negative for everyone else? In my personal experience, the answer is a big YES.