Online ads are here to stay, there is no doubt - in my mind at least - about that. That said, the industry <i>is</i> in trouble, there seems to be a disconnect between the users and the products advertised hitherto unseen and many in the advertising industry are acutely aware of this. Nobody has found a silver bullet on how to fix this and it is only a matter of time before there will be some reaction to this ever decreasing engagement.<p>Making an ad campaign that has a positive ROI is doable, but if you are that well embedded in the industry then you will quite likely agree with me that it has become quite a bit harder to achieve that today than it was in the past. The solution (performance based advertising) shifts the burden of the effectiveness of a campaign onto the wrong party (the owner of the inventory) which has resulted in a series of start-ups that optimize on behalf of inventory owner.<p>This is all like watching eb-and-flood erode a beach and just like real life erosion there are turning points at which the situation can go from steady state to dynamic quite rapidly and it is anybody&#x27;s guess what the new steady configuration will be once all the potential for movement has been exhausted.<p>The ad industry is imo not exactly in a bubble as much as that they are more than a little bit worried about why the usual bag of tricks no longer works and how they plan on going back to when conversion rates were still something to be proud of. I don&#x27;t doubt that this will initially be tackled with a wave of even more invasive advertising, or advertising masquerading as content.<p>The problem is that what was initially an absolute boon for the advertising industry, that you can &#x27;measure&#x27; engagement ended up being the exact problem, you can measure engagement, including a steady drop in engagement over time. And so, by making advertising more and more aggressive the industry has made it impossible - or nearly so - to make a non-aggressive campaign because it has to compete with all the aggressive ones for attention (from the users perspective it is a zero sum game, they only have 24 hours in a day and usually something else to do besides watching and engaging with ads, and if they don&#x27;t then they are not exactly prime material for some demographic to begin with).<p>So now there is a problem, which is that the ad industry can&#x27;t suddenly stop reporting all these engagement metrics, nor can they pull more technological rabbits out of the hat that spawned all these new tricks because these too will work for a while and then run out.<p>It&#x27;s not a simple problem.