Yeah, &quot;placement doesn&#x27;t work&quot; happens, and it is because another party keeps increasing their bid. Sometimes that was because they blind bid, sometimes it is because they have funds to burn through (Groupon, Zynga, all the big mobile games, Uber, Lyft, all fit in this category, and they bought enough in their time to really move ad rates), other times the company just had a better model and it forced me to make other adjustments to my campaign.<p>Is the question the expansion in adtech companies? If that is so, I think a huge part has been the Facebook traffic dumps to publishers like news sites. Basically the available display inventory something like doubled. That isn&#x27;t sustainable, Facebook fully intends to recapture that external traffic back in to their platform. The drop is already visible to some publishers. Many companies certainly are turning a blind eye to fraud so as to hide the bad news from their clients and investors.<p>At some point the shift from offline to digital ends and the growth moves more in line with GDP. That will bring down valuations. Google and Facebook probably want to integrate the ad model with every human transaction. One could imagine getting in a Google car and saying &quot;pizza&quot; and be driven to the highest bidding pizza shop.<p>Certainly ad costs get baked in to some products in a big way: Coca-Cola, Geico, hotel rooms, for profit universities, and so on. Sometimes the costs are so much the profit center moves to another area, such as investing the float from insurance or maybe just straight up stealing money out of a person&#x27;s bank account (pay day loan lead aggregators selling bank info to criminals, has happened many times, see FTC.)<p>As a whole, I don&#x27;t know how this plays out. If the ad competition is brutal enough the costs will be driven up to the point where the parties not spending money on advertising are just far better deals. If it isn&#x27;t the prices running up, the cost could be offloaded somewhere else like cutting maintenance at a hotel. Eventually the advertiser&#x27;s reputation tanks.<p>These are marketplaces. On a micro level there are many perverse distortions because of some condition at a given time. Over time they should re-balance.<p>Some things like Coca-Cola, which has probably physically harmed and killed people on the scale of cigarettes, just last a really long time. Coca-Cola has a truly perverse combination of trademark law enforcement, addiction (caffeine+sugar), general scientific ignorance by consumers, and a long list of government subsidized cost advantages. All of these strengths save trademark law are being chipped away at right now. Which, at some point it flips and they have the McDonalds problem (toxic brand.)