This is what sort of baffles me. Ad spend is not going down. Yet publisher revenue is stagnant or worse. Look at every media outlet scaling back and/or cryin

This is what sort of baffles me. Ad spend is not going down. Yet publisher revenue is stagnant or worse. Look at every media outlet scaling back and/or crying poverty. This is the gateway to most of the worst of the advertising ecosystem. Nobody WANTS sleazy/creepy/loud/excessive ads on their sites, because it's their brand being ran down in the end. But it's seen as the only way to keep their heads above water. I suspect the real story here is the growth of the middlemen and platforms. In 1990, when you called up your local newspaper and ordered a quarter-page ad for $50, the publisher got every cent of it. Now, you buy $50 of PPC ads, it gets routed through several layers of cross-selling and arbitrage, and $5 is actually distributed to publishers. I'm surprised nobody's built a mutually owned co-op ad network. That would allow the participants to recapture most of the value lost to third party intermediaries. With so much less revenue leakage, they could offer tamer adds that paid as well as the current 82 banners, full tracking, and a chumbox design.