Mastodawn

"When ad spend on media peaked 20 years ago, advertising accounted for 1.25% of our entire GDP. But now, in this increasingly digital days, it's around 0.75%."

#ColinPeacock, 2026

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2019028882/who-s-winning-the-war-where-ad-money-goes-chathams-scandal

So what does this tell us? What all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the big DataFarms hoovering up most of the remaining ad spend obscures or avoid admitting;

Advertising is a dying industry. Has been since the net went mainstream.

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#podcasts #RNZ #MediaWatch #advertising

Who’s winning the war, where ad money goes, Chathams scandal

The bulk of the big money advertisers spent in our media goes offshore to big online operators. What's the future for the ad industry here? Also: mixed messages about when the war will end in Iran, and a startling scandal in the Chathams that hit the headlines too late.

RNZ

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Strypey Mar 31

If we ever needed ads to tell us what products and services existed, we certainly don't now. We've got search engines for that, and review/ Q&A sites tell us which ones are any good, and which suppliers are reliably trustworthy.

Media platforms that relies on ads for revenue are dinosaurs, and the asteroid hit about 20 years ago. The DataFarmers are hoovering up the bulk of the shrinking ad spend because they hire the best snake oil salesmen, not because they provide any real value.

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Strypey

Putting on my tinfoil hat on, I suspect the vast majority of online ad clicks are fake, a practice known as 'click fraud'. A lot of studies have been done on different methods of click fraud; the use of automated systems, mechanical turking, and other such scams. Such as this 2024 review of methods;

https://doi.org/10.5120/ijca2024923300

The actors with the best access to the relevant data have no incentive to reveal the true rates they discover, and may even be accomplices in the fraud themselves.

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Strypey Mar 31

Ad spend will continue to shrink and concentrate in the hands of con artists. As far as media ads are concerned, they've mostly gone already, and they're not coming back. Despite the arse-covering, rearguard action the ad industry is mounting to cover that up.

If media are to survive as commercial businesses - and I'm not sure that's even desirable - or survive in any operational form, they're going to need to find new revenue sources. Fact.

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