A bubble? Have ad prices gone up recently? I haven't been in the industry for a decade, but at that point there was a loooonggggg trend of declining ad rates since the heydey of the dotcom bubble. Wasn't that what was behind the "pivot to video" too? Nobody thinks simple display ads are worth that much?

Ad spend, impressions, clickthroughs, and conversions are all heavily instrumented and tracked, the idea that there's a two-decades-long blind spot bubble strikes me as extremely farfetched.

Everyone knows there's a lot of fraud, its generally baked into the price at this point, and is why some sorts of ads are far cheaper than others, but (almost)[0] everyone also tracks their bottom line for returns.

[0] brand campaigns are different than direct response here, but that's an even older thing that predates the internet entirely so is unlikely to implode.

> Ad spend, impressions, clickthroughs, and conversions are all heavily instrumented and tracked

Definitely but I’d argue that they’re even more heavily gamed. The information asymmetry between the platform and the ad buyers is just too large. The incentive to misrepresent is basically limitless. Truly tracking effectiveness requires a degree of privacy invasion that even the platforms can no longer get away with.

> there was a loooonggggg trend of declining ad rates <...> Nobody thinks simple display ads are worth that much? > Everyone knows there's a lot of fraud, its generally baked into the price at this point,

Spamming more of cheaper ads for the same price does not count as ads getting better in my book. If anything, to me it indicates the opposite: if ads were getting better, campaigns would be getting smaller, shorter, cheaper.

I remember hearing on a podcast several years ago that there is this underground network of buying traffic where legitimate websites can someone buy traffic through these click farm sites (e.g. top 10 X where you have to click next every time). And they can somehow transfer it to their metrics. The basic underlying idea was that pretty much all online advertising and media companies are sitting on fraudulent stats and all advertisers would probably wake up and the bubble will pop.

I can't find any information about this in particular because I don't know the term to search for. Does anyone if this is true or how to find out more about this underground network?

AI is problematic because the cost of producing convincing bullshit is essentially zero now.

I don't think it's problematic for anyone other than the spammers.

No longer do they need to hire an army of cheap copywriters in some third world country to produce their spam. Anyone can run a spam farm nearly for free, and crowding the market is inevitably going to be driving down the profitability for everyone in the business as clicks and impressions are diluted. As is the trend with AI in general, it's really hard to build an effective moat.

We have optimised such that the "Semantic Web" is no longer necessary.

We have now improved the A.I. to seem almost convincing, and sufficiently degraded the N.I.[1] such that convincing people takes much less effort.

[1] Natural Intelligence

Ah yes, the old, tired "if only the public would critically think about this stuff"

....it's true though? Most people don't care about this kind of stuff

Indeed. It is a very low bidder and does an increasingly decent job.

"There is no way web ads are worth what companies are paying for them now."

Sadly, it seems that they are worth slightly more than what people are paying for them. I don't know who of the 5 billion online are motivated by these ads, but there are enough of them and they have enough money to make the system viable.

I have a friend who runs a local business entirely via Google ads, when he has space capacity he increases his ads spend and his capacity is used, when he has tight capacity he cuts back on his spend. He has a consumer facing business.

Corporate Sales & Marketing budgets would need to get slashed in order for web ads to drop in value.

I don’t see an obvious catalyst for that in the short-term.

It wouldn't take that, just a leak/study of the ROI of online advertising. If the results show that the average ad impression is significantly less than currently assumed, then everything goes to hell in a handbasket.

The status quo is that nobody knows how effective their ads are. The only people with the data necessary to even begin to analyze the effectiveness of ads are the ad-serving companies, who have a strongly vested interest in making them appear as miraculously effective as possible.

The marketing boys surely are hiding some causality mixups to drive their department budgets.

I mean if I Google a brand store the first result is usually and ad for the store and the next the store. If they measure the revenue from adclickers they hugely overestimate the value of the ad since the clickers where going there in the first place.

It is probably a complicit SC between Google and marketing folks. They are pimping their PowerPoints.