A lot of people complain about banners and their load time delays, but I don't care so much about that. What concerns me is the drastic influence advertisers have on content. We've seen what this business model has done for television. That's enough to make me worry. It's rooted in the ratings game.
Advertising becomes a strong influence toward mass audience marketing.
The more exposures they get, the more they pay. The problem is it forces publishers into a strategy of building their audience to the largest possible size. At some point they tend to lose the focus and specialization that brought them an audience in the first place. The sad part is that the Internet is so well suited to specialization and the specific common needs of small audiences. Advertising driven business strategies may cause us to lose sight of that.