So here's a pesky theory that pops into my mind every time I hear a story like this. I really hope everyone will say it's crazy, though, because the consequence

So here's a pesky theory that pops into my mind every time I hear a story like this. I really hope everyone will say it's crazy, though, because the consequences are pretty dire. Advertising is good at selling some products, but advertisers are spectacular at selling advertising. So we've had almost a century-long bubble in bullshit. The best way you outsell other advertisers, masters of bullshit themselves, all spinning how effective their ad is, is by selling metrics alongside your advertising. Metrics are the anti-bullshit. Well, almost... You want something that looks like "actual sales caused." You want to tell a guy, "pay me $10 per ad, and I will generate 10 sales, each giving you $2 profit you wouldn't have otherwise made. We'll split the winnings." You want to claim metrics for sales caused, but you don't really want those exact numbers, you kind of want something that looks hard that you can spin. Something loosely correlated with "actual sales caused" where your art of bullshitting can get slightly better returns than the exact numbers would get. Play to your strengths, right? So magazines come along with subscription numbers, and that's great sauce. Then television comes along with the Nielsen family and, ok, actually Nielsen starts way back with radio in the 1920s, but same idea. Radio/television advertising reaches the most people and every company starts to pay a premium. Advertisers have the whole industry sliced, diced, catalogued and formulated. Superbowl is the premium end, free weeklies are the bottom of the barrel. Everybody has a place, but everyone's using the same game to guess at eyeballs, to guess at actual sales caused. Suddenly, though, there's this new game on the internet. Not a lot of eyeballs at first, so it starts in free weekly category. Suddenly though, Google (and maybe some other companies) can tell you how many ads are actually getting action rather than just eyeballs. It's a metric like we've never seen before, it's the killer metric. Sure, you could get this from surveys, or test markets, but this is like measuring everyone who sees the ad. It's pretty cool. But remember, metrics this accurate are dangerous, it shows when advertising doesn't work too. And a lot of advertising is spin, a lot of it isn't all that great, because advertisers are better at selling ads than they are at selling your product. I hope someone tells me this is all nonsense, though, because if it's true, then Internet advertising is both absorbing the advertising industry then destroying it. That'd be sad. I mean, sure, it's showing us which of our emperors are already naked. But it might mean the constant death of random content sites like this.