The evolution of online ads is pretty remarkable.

Companies were used to putting a lot of money into ads in offline media. The thing is, there is no way of measuring whether a TV ad actually had an effect, especially if that ad is running every day. But the marketing people could easily say “See how much revenue there is? It’s all due to ads.”

Now online ads came along, and in the early 2000s or so, most ads you’d see where by big companies. McDonalds, Coca Cola, Ikea, etc.

Now tracking enters the scene and you can now actually measure how many people click the ads and how many just ignore them. Turns out, people click on white, empty space more often than on ads.

So one by one these big companies reduce their online ad budget, because they realize it’s worthless. Instead they turn to direct sponsorships or offline ads.

At the same time the amount of available online ad spaces grows immensely, with more and more people going online. This reduces the payout of online ads enormously, so the ad space providers fill their pages with more and more ads to make up the lost revenue.

So who is to fill this gap between less ad space being bought and more ad space being provided?

Malicious actors, that is who fills the gap. Some ads are straight-up malware, some link to malware and some are pure scams.

So people use adblockers to not see these scam/malware/tracking deployment vehicles, which reduces the available ad space, so now the ad space providers show more ads to the people who don’t use adblockers and try to force adblock users to disable adblock.

Looks to me like the whole market is in a death spiral.