Nonsense. "I don't click on ads, therefore online ads are useless" is not a valid methodology.

I buy Facebook ads for a niche audience. I can track them; the ads work and bring me business and put food on my table. There is absolutely no way I could advertise with traditional media; demographics like "males 18-24" is nowhere near targeted enough.

I don't click on online ads either. But then I'm just not the type of person that does. That doesn't change the fact that they work in a measurable way.

This seems to be an argument for "an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper", which you seem to be arguiing against in parent comments...

Every ad I hear is injected into my phonological loop. It fades as the neural activity drops back to normal.

An ad is an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad. It does not matter whether it reaches my brain from a computer monitor, a television screen, a radio speaker, or newsprint. I have the choice to attend to it, or not.

The argument here is that ads viewed or heard by robots will probably never reach a human brain. The computer-delivered ads make different types of metering and targeting possible, but they also make the advertiser vulnerable to automated exploits and automated blocking.

In print, you can extrapolate from statistical modeling and circulation numbers. In television and radio, the same can be done with ratings numbers. On the Internet, there are so many possible metrics. The problem is the advertisers started an arms race they cannot win, because they had to make themselves more useful than the media companies' internal advertising departments.

Those guys could sell fractions of a page of static ads. Those ads get served with the same content, every time someone reads the paper. Any targeting has to be based on the predicted audience for the content itself. Men's razors advertised in the sports section; the exact same razors but marketed to women advertised in the lifestyle section. Car, boat, and RV dealers advertised in the business news section. If the online edition of newspapers embedded their own non-scripted copy of static print ads, served from their own servers, from the same places as their article images and stock photos, nobody would bother trying to block them. That's just what newspaper articles look like, to everyone that remembers when they were actual papers that got delivered by kids on bicycles.

The ad services that sucker media companies into using them are worth 1000 times less than the ads served in-house, because of all their clever nonsense they attempted in order to trick the media-companies into using them. I don't need to block dumb ads; I might want to, but I don't need to. I do need to block ads that run scripts and set cookies, because they hijack my own resources to make my experience across the entire web worse. There is nothing inherent wrong with writing an article that has a permanent, static set of ads in it.

Old media had the full-page, half-page, quarter-page, per-column-inch, and classified ads. A new media article can be pasted into a template, with a fixed number of advertising slots. Show the article template to your registered advertisers, who know your standards for the slots, and let them buy specific slots for specific articles, categories of article, or anywhere on the site. Paste the approved ads into the slots for them, and archive the article page. That's now what the site serves whenever the URL is requested, forevermore. It's the same as going to the library and looking up a newspaper microfiche page from October 15, 1985; the ads are still the same, and just got one more impression.