I've worked in the adtech industry for years and now run a new company focused on content/native ads.

Online advertising is a vast and complicated ecosystem with hundreds of companies and lots of politics but all this is to say that sites like Gigaom failing are almost never just down to simple factors as "ads pay less". Some points on online advertising itself though, in random order:

- Overall pageviews online are up, a lot. More people are online now and with more devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, even tvs).

- Ad blockers (depending on the site) can be anywhere from 10-50% of users.

- Desktop is now the minority, usually about 35% of traffic.

- Ad blockers are mostly on desktop, so while they are making an impact, it's somewhat minimized by the shift to mobile.

- Ad blockers are also mostly run by corporations that make money and most allow companies to buy exceptions (Google does this, along with all those recommended links guys like Outbrain, Taboola and dozens of others. To be perfectly honest, we're trying to get on this list as well.)

- There's a difference between branding/awareness campaigns (like for GE) vs performance campaigns (like for Newegg). Awareness is about getting you to recognize, remember, engage with and otherwise think about the brand. Especially important for B2B/enterprise and other companies that don't have things for consumers to buy, or even cheap enough for mainstream. Performance is all about getting a click, or these days even a signup, purchase or some other "action".

- The ability of digital advertising to track things to such a granular level has made everything more efficient, driving down prices to a few cents per click in some cases. The ads you see on a webpage have gone through an entire auction process with dozens of bidders in about 100 milliseconds before you ever see anything.

- Fraud is a huge issue along with viewability (whether an ad actually shows up inside the browser window vs. never being scrolled into view, inactive tab, etc). Early studies have pegged fraud/viewability problems at almost 50% although this is rapidly going down with new companies and standards. Nobody wants fraud and it's a constant arms race.

- There are lots of ad types, everything from display (banners) to rich media (interstitials, popups, expanding/moving/interactive stuff), to native ads, to video, to email, and more. They all work on different parts of the "sales funnel" and there are different strategies in place. One of the biggest is called retargeting. It's when you visit a site then see ads for that same company across the web, even days or weeks later. It's all about making you remember and come back to learn more, buy something, etc. And it works really well.

- Display ads do work. While everyone seems to think that they won't ever click on a banner, Google sees hundreds of millions of clicks a day. Those recommended widgets get tens of millions of clicks a day. Ads work, whether you want to believe it or not, otherwise this industry wouldn't exist. Those billboards on the side of a freeway are far more expensive than small campaigns online but they're still bought because you can measure the effect before and after and see a measurable increase in whatever you're interested in.

- People complain that they get crappy ads, unfortunately they also complain about being tracked. Trust me, ad networks want to get you the best ads as possible. Showing you what you're interested helps everyone. But we can't know who you are, what you've seen or anything else if we can't track you in some way. And for those who are worried about privacy, for all the legit ad platforms, you're nothing more than a randomized id number. Not personal information. If you're worried about that, then stay off Facebook where most people willingly give all their info.

- Most advertising is being shifted to be bought on audiences rather than sites. Native ads are shifting this back somewhat but most modern platforms work by selling audience segments primarily, so as an advertiser you would run a campaign targeting 18-25 males interested in sports for example. Doesn't matter what site, as long as the audience matches and this is facilitated by the efficiency of running the aforementioned auctions (called RTB for Real-Time Bidding).

- While privacy is important, there's an arms race with tracking because advertisers want this audience access. The recent issue with cookies has only made tech companies even better at tracking and there are entire sub-industries dedicated to tracking people across all of their devices. We can do this today. And it will only get better. Again the intentions are to get you better ads but if you're worried about privacy, just be aware that it's not that easy to "hide".

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If you've read this far, I hope that helped give some insight into online ads. I'm sorry I can't give exact sources as this is data that comes our ad network and it's not published anywhere, but we do have global coverage and this is very accurate in the US/European region. Disclaimer again: I run https://instinctive.io but feel free to email/message if you want more info.