I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which ha

I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc). The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues: - Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads. - Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view. Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI. A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.