Online advertising is confusing to me. Clickthrough seems like a very limited view of what advertising actually is or should be. I don't know how much advertisi

Online advertising is confusing to me. Clickthrough seems like a very limited view of what advertising actually is or should be. I don't know how much advertising money is being spent overall these days but for most of my life, advertisers and their customers have done just fine using billboards, TV ads, newspaper and magazine ads, and other situational impression-based advertising. Billions of dollars were spent and made on such ads. The prices were based on estimated impressions, not on how many customers immediately entered into a business transaction before doing anything else. It's ridiculous to expect website users to drop what they're doing and click through to some other site that they know is going to try to sell them something. It's far better to get your brand and product in their minds via the impression. It's far more likely this will pay off in the long run. Asking users to engage immediately is asking them to throw away what they were doing for something they weren't. That's foolish. I wouldn't be surprised in 90% of the "clickthroughs" are mistakes anyway. That would explain why phone clickthroughs are so much higher, because it's way easier to accidentally click on the ad instead of the X. I also wonder how the listed stats on how well people remember the last banner ad they saw compares to magazine, newspaper, and TV ads. And how the numbers change with different layouts and approaches. I'm sure there are people in the industry who have numbers on this, and they must not show what I think they show. But the direction web advertising is going is not a healthy direction for anyone involved. I feel like a major change in the CW around the current approach to online ads has to happen. Ad blockers would be easily thwarted if publishers hosted the ad content themselves. There's obviously a question of potential impression-count fraud to be addressed, but magazines and newspapers and TV and radio broadcasters have all solved their own versions of these problems. But it's not like the current system of ad networks that are filled with literal scams and thousands or millions of fake websites serving fake ads to fake clients via fake web searches are exactly fraud-free. I think the software engineers who've created the current broken system did too good a job of selling their cleverness, and we've got a bunch of wrongheaded metrics and approaches that are feeding a vicious cycle. How do we break out? I have no idea. But the answer has to come from the publishers and the companies looking to advertise. Podcasting seems to have found a far healthier balance. And maybe we're just in the golden age and the money ultimately won't be there in the long run, but regardless, the web is long past its own golden age.