1. There's a sizable amount of budget in a process of migrating away from offline advertising market, partially thanks to COVID. This increases auction competit

1. There's a sizable amount of budget in a process of migrating away from offline advertising market, partially thanks to COVID. This increases auction competition. 2. Online advertising still have a room for better optimization in many ways. You'll be surprised on how primitive bidding systems are for a large fraction of advertisers. Better bidding means ads more likely to convert. Also note that HN readers are extreme outliers compared to usual people who actually spend money on ads. My gut feeling is that perhaps >90% of people don't care much about whether it's ads or not if it seems relevant enough for them.