I hope it collapses fast and hard. Advertising is a nearly worthless vampire industry that works to suck some of the life out of other useful services. If Cisco, Qualcomm, or Texas Instruments threw in the towel, their respective industries would change forever; we would be hearing about it in a matter of minutes. The same can't be said for any advertising company other than Google, and that's not because we find Google's advertising particularly endearing. As time wears on and consumer patience for advertising wears thin, Google will need a miracle in a market that the world can't live without.
It has always been something of a mystery to me that billions of dollars of revenues are somehow extracted from the internet in this form.
My reaction to advertising in all forms is visceral and strong. I don't really understand it, but I know that I am willing to go to some lengths to avoid it. Reading HN threads over the years has shown me that I'm not alone.
For this reason, I've come to believe that this era of internet advertising will be a brief flash in the pan of history. I have no idea what the next step will be, but it's hard for me to imagine the future internet being one held up by something that is genuinely despised by so many.
Mass quantities of free, mediocre quality content will give way to something else in this new equilibrium. But what will pay for all the infrastructure? All a subject for science fiction writers at the moment.
> Mass quantities of free, mediocre quality content will give way to something else in this new equilibrium. But what will pay for all the infrastructure?
There are still a lot of people who just rent a (virtual) server, or rent space on someone else's platform, to post whatever they want. They might have tens, hundreds, thousands of viewers. They could easily scale to even more viewers with the help of some off-the-shelf CDN, while keeping the total expense well within the realm of "hobby spending" for most people in the developed world.
Producing and distributing content only costs a lot of money if you want to deliver a lot of content to a lot of people. But I would much prefer a decentralized network where a lot of people each produce and distribute a little bit of content. Each of them would only incur a small expense, if and only if they want to. It will probably cost less than what they're already paying for advertising anyway.
Even in a world like that, large content producers who actually have a concrete revenue stream, such as Hollywood studios and a small number of world-famous and/or publicly funded news outlets, will continue to reach billions of people at a time. We don't need to worry about BBC as we say farewell to thousands of content mills who had no reason to exist in the first place.
