That's why I said "some combination of metrics" as an alternative to "clicks". In other words, yes, traffic will always matter, but there has to be better discr

That's why I said "some combination of metrics" as an alternative to "clicks". In other words, yes, traffic will always matter, but there has to be better discrimination among kinds of traffic. Traffic that's worthless to advertisers -- i.e. I clicked to your page and bounced immediately without actually engaging or really "seeing" any of the ads that loaded -- should be priced at $0. Traffic that's worthwhile to advertisers -- i.e. I clicked to your page and stayed there for a bit, engrossed in the content and noticing the ads and getting a positive feeling from both -- should be priced somewhere north of $0. I've been in this business on the content and publishing side for almost 20 years now, and I've seen very many attempts to distinguish worthless traffic from worthwhile traffic. As with the fake news/headlines issue, the above problem persists and is not amenable to a quick technical fix because it's ultimately a problem of incentives: publishers and ad agencies are strongly incentivized to maximize the percentage of a publisher's traffic that (by hook or by crook) can be classified as worthwhile to the advertiser, whether it really is or not. Given that the ad agency supposedly represents the advertiser in the negotiation with the publisher over campaign pricing and value but is nonetheless incentivized to collude with the publisher because the agency gets paid based on the size of the ad spend, you can see how the advertiser is left with no one looking out for his/her interests and is at the mercy of an industry that pitches it "metric of the month" as a proxy for value. You can also see why performance advertising platforms that offer advertisers tons of real-world data and transparency, i.e. FB and Google, are eating up the entire ad industry. It's just a better deal for advertisers than the publisher + agency model. At least, we thought it was, but now that FB has admitted to "accidentally" screwing advertisers with bad metrics, who knows... Anyway, yeah, traffic will always matter. My only point is that in a world where revenue scales with any and all forms of traffic, no matter how worthless to the advertiser (and the user, in many cases), is a world where people will pursue traffic by any means. Edit: Ultimately, though, if you're optimizing for "user got some sort of potentially actionable informational value from this" instead of "user got momentary emotional charge (i.e. the classic 'surprise and delight') and the advertiser got positive/useful vibes in the process", the answer has always been user-funded content. This was true in the era of print/TV/radio, and it's true today. Every ad-supported model will always optimize for emotional manipulation over any other form of utility to the consumer. For some types of content (i.e. fiction and pure entertainment) this works out great, and for others (i.e. news, reviews, investigative reporting) it will always eventually lead to disaster.