What is an "ad" really? There are companies who will pay money for a bit of attention, and companies who get some attention willing to sell it. There will alwa

What is an "ad" really? There are companies who will pay money for a bit of attention, and companies who get some attention willing to sell it. There will always be a market for selling attention. Always. It's never going away. Attention is a valuable commodity and companies are willing to pay for some. CPMs, CPCs, CPAs... don't matter. There's a budget for ads, and that budget will get spent. Who it goes to and how much attention it buys them will change. When I left the web dev game last year, the big exciting trend was dynamic bidding systems, where many different ad networks would bid to show you an ad in real time. [1] Advertisers are adapting. Publishers are adapting. RTB comes and increases profits and in the end, publishers who adapt do fine. While CPMs for traditional banner ads continue to fall, that just means the market for selling attention has moved on to something else. [1] https://clearcode.cc/blog/real-time-bidding/ https://clearcode.cc/blog/real-time-bidding/