I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread. It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow nich

I think yours is the best explanation I've seen in this thread. It's not that innovation has stopped, but rather that it has been focused in a very narrow niche as of late: the advertising niche. Everyone seems to be doing something in advertising, whether it's brokering ads or harvesting eyeballs. Most of these seem to be in the perennially doomed space of "we will invent something unrelated to advertising and try to shoehorn an ad-based business model into it". This is also why when a not-ad-related web business starts up we fall all over ourselves - AirBnb, Square, etc.