It's not that growth is stagnant. All this data has convinced a lot of industry experts that banner ads will soon be extinct, and with them, all forms of online advertising. Not only that, but according to Searls, the Web isn't suited for advertising at all. According to Searls, the Internet is ideally suited to making sales but is very poorly suited for advertising. In this respect, the Net is much like the telephone.
Traditional advertising is made for mass media.
But the Internet is not a mass medium, no matter how many people are using it. Searls is right. They'll change shape literally at first. In the next year, ads will appear in various shapes and sizes, in boxes to the left or right of Web content, or interspersed between paragraphs. For the companies that seek nothing more than branding, these new ads will be a dream come true.