I've worked on 5-6 high traffic content sites in my 15 year career. The problem with Internet advertising is likely the part that people first loved about it: immediate analytics.

Here's the problem. When every action you get paid for is a metric, it forces those metrics to eventually be corrupted. Need CPM eyeballs? We solved that one decades ago... link rings. Today's link ring is outbrain, nrelate and the rest. Here, we'll put web sugar on our pages with bikinis and top 10 lists. Eyeballs you have. Doesn't matter that the site sells itself as a tech magazine, it's real traffic is comic con photos of Jean Grey. No one will know.

Maybe you get paid for clicks. OK. We have solutions for that too. Let's put adwords in the page. Let's style them to look like navigation. Let's create popovers with super tiny close buttons that purposefully have their display and href off by a few pixels. Let's delay it to load so that we can likely grab a rogue accidental click as well. Smaller screen, less precision as you do in mobile? Perfect, even better. We'll autoplay movies one after the other, but only if we have an ad. There's a system to all of this.

Then of course you run into the engineers and executives that simply don't care. The Internet to them isn't the democratization of knowledge, it's an opportunity. "People want to click on Bikinis, why do you care". The problem of course is ads become a pattern. Once one large site falls into selling a certain system, the rest fall like dominos. Because the ad providers aren't going to create unique ads per site.

Meanwhile I was building very genuine, audience driven sites that were doing a hundreds of thousands of people a day. Mostly, believe it or not, DIRECT traffic. It doesn't matter. You can't compete with 10s of millions from link arbitrage, 99% referral traffic. You're not a big site. You don't matter. Sure we'd get hundreds of real comments and discussion per story, but there's only three-hundred thousand people on the site, who cares.

The problem of course is this is just as big a problem for the content producers themselves. They go to work day to day and get beaten over the head to make cheap, quick content that attracts the most viewers. The shotgun approach, something will hit. For the first couple years they fight it out, but eventually they give up too. It's easy.

There are companies solely dedicated to this. They create cheap content with little or no value, a getty image subscription, and siphon links from larger, less valuable networks like yahoo and aol. They pay 1 cent for the link and charge 2 for the ad. These quick, pop-up sites feature some sort of vertical branding (cars, babies...etc) and sell their growth to unknowlegable ad-buyers. Look, we're a brand new car site that's getting 2 million uniques a day!

It's depresses me sometimes. It was hard to work around that kind of scam and not dip to those levels. The pressure is always immense. If you just use such and such dark pattern, you can solve all your problems.

I really hope things like Patreon work out. I'd love to see people paying for smart content. It's needs to be easier than it is.

It's of course not all bad. On the positive, small scale publishing by the individual is as healthy as ever. A good quarter of the links you'll read on this page today are on somebody's blog, containing no ads and featuring real, genuine ideas and knowledge.