First, you could still track a direct response conversion by including information in the url for if they click on it. You can still even track impressions by m

First, you could still track a direct response conversion by including information in the url for if they click on it. You can still even track impressions by measuring requests. Second, if this will truly cause a drop in advertising spend.... then that money will be spent somewhere else, which might boost a different industry. I don't think this would really change advertising spend, though... it would just change the type of advertising and how it is tracked/paid for. Advertisers still want to get their ads in front of people, and the amount of content to advertising demand wouldn't change. In fact, I think a change to content based advertising will help with content quality. With user based advertising, an advertiser doesn't care if the valuable person is viewing good content or not. Content creators just need to attract the valuable eyeballs, and can use as much click bait and useless content as possible to get them. With content based advertising, the advertiser will spend on quality content, because that is the only metric they have to try to reach quality users.