The risk for the ad-based business model is on the buy side. Digital "won" because it could generate pretty dashboards to convince people that it was producing

The risk for the ad-based business model is on the buy side. Digital "won" because it could generate pretty dashboards to convince people that it was producing better targeting/reach/etc. than traditional spray-and-pray ads. They acted like they had a solution for "I don't know which half of my ad money is wasted." To deliver this, we built a world of trillion-dollar middlemen, the creepy tracking experience, and opaque platforms. So now we can answer that question, but the answer is two-fold: "the wasted part of the ad spend is the cash paying for Mark Zuckerberg's VR hobby and not actually turning into pixels on customer screens" and also "You're now wasting 70% of your ad spend, and it's a bigger total spend than when you were hand-wringing about wasting 50% of it." A lot of the slop in the ad market is low-quality channels feeding off of bottom-feed networks, most of which would be unviable without a large, confusing ad supply chain. Nobody actively goes out to be the unskippable ad that people are accidentally clicking because a crappy mobile game launched it mid-screen in the middle of play, but that sort of garbage is bankrolling a lot of products. I expect the bubbles will pop one day, and we'll see much more direct advertising and a major price reset. A lot of ad-driven products will fold or reposition based on more realistic valuation.