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'The Future of Advertising is Fewer, Better Ads' (recode.net)
For more than a decade, the online advertising world has been dominated by "display ads," served up to consumers alongside web content, search results or social media posts. But they're not the only game in town, one digital ad exec says. From a report: "I think the advertising world going forward is going to be filled with fewer, better ads," Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer said on the latest episode of Recode Media. "The display advertising market is going to crater. By giving away stuff for free for so long, we've created an ad economy that is bigger than it should be," he added. Schafer says there's a untapped value in "nonstandard" ads, meaning branded content and other forms of advertising on platforms such as Snapchat, Musical.ly, WeHeartIt and Imgur.
Yep, AdBlock shows this page only had 32 ads blocked!
The point is that zero ads is the best number of ads! I block ads in my browser. There are just too many, and they are too annoying (and headache inducing!) to not block them. Sites that request to be white-listed in my ad blocker, or that won't let me see content without white-listing or disabling my ad blocker, never get visited again, if I even bother to remember them! I just go elsewhere.
I didn't always block ads online. I have been using computers since the DOS 3.3 days, since before the Internet was available to the average person and we had Bulletin Board Systems. Since the only way to access the internet was dial-up. I only started blocking ads when they became really annoying. Flashing red and yellow ads, pop-ups that covered content, auto-playing video ads etc... And when there started being more ads than content on far too many web pages!
And I "cut the cord" years ago, dropping ad-infested cable TV for streaming services that not only cost literally 1/10th of what cable TV costs today, but have no ads. Advertisers have so annoyed many of us that there is no going back! The only ads that would (maybe!) be acceptable to me would be small, static ads that are directly related to the content of the page that they are displayed on, with maybe 1 ad per page, and not splitting one page worth of text into several pages to display more ads.
If there are new, innovative, worthwhile products out there, I will find out about them eventually. But most of the stuff being pushed the hardest is crap that I will never want and don't need (IoT crap etc...)
In theory, you could use YaCy and adjust the algorithm yourself. Self-hosting my search is still on my "to-do" list (not my "done" list), though.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz