My thoughts as well. Between GDPR making current ad models harder to pull off and more risky and the fact that ads are getting less effective I think I might see an advertising bubble:
Here are my thoughts, comments on why this is wrong are welcome: the market for online ads seems to have been growing more than consumers disposable income for two decades.
Much of that might have come from cannibalizing other forms of advertising, but sooner or later it can't grow anymore as a new equilibrium has been reached between TV ads and online ads and consumers don't have more money to spend anyway.
I remember an old blog post from Google or something showing a whiteboard with crazy thoughts: what if we could have a mirror behind the earth to reflect sunlight and make the day longer? Then people could spend more time searching => more ad impressions => more revenue.
I feel we are at that point now, only consumers have enough time to browse, they just can't buy more than they already do (and some markets might be even beyond that point, fueled by credit card debt etc.)
I've argued this point before, and have hoped for comments from people who run ad-supported blogs. Or manage larger commercial sites. Just to see if my estimate low-balls ad income. But no ...
I do believe that we're in an ad bubble. For one thing, I've read that it's hard to measure effectiveness. You can look at revenue vs ad spending. But so many other factors affect revenue. Some you have measures for, such as how the economy's doing.
But for others there's no public data. Such as ad spending by competitors. You can measure that directly, or buy data from firms that do. I gather that's a key use for VPN services with residential IP blocks.
And then there's the fact that you're typically running multiple ad campaigns. So it may not be obvious which of them actually increased revenue.
Bottom line, I suspect that firms have been throwing money at online advertising. Either blindly, or seduced by bullshit from ad management firms. And so it's entirely possible that total ad spending is greater than users' discretionary income.
But if that disappeared, and was replaced by user micropayments, I doubt that all sites would be impacted equally. HN and Wilders wouldn't be impacted at all, for example, because they don't run "ads" per se. And popular sites generally could probably earn as much as they do now from ads. At least, if their paywalls couldn't be gamed.
So is there anything that would disappear that's valuable? I can't imagine that anyone would miss ad-supported link farms, for example.
Here are my thoughts, comments on why this is wrong are welcome: the market for online ads seems to have been growing more than consumers disposable income for two decades.
Much of that might have come from cannibalizing other forms of advertising, but sooner or later it can't grow anymore as a new equilibrium has been reached between TV ads and online ads and consumers don't have more money to spend anyway.
I remember an old blog post from Google or something showing a whiteboard with crazy thoughts: what if we could have a mirror behind the earth to reflect sunlight and make the day longer? Then people could spend more time searching => more ad impressions => more revenue.
I feel we are at that point now, only consumers have enough time to browse, they just can't buy more than they already do (and some markets might be even beyond that point, fueled by credit card debt etc.)