Re: The only reason that the ads get blocked ...
"That brought in more money than the supposedly individually targeted ads we get today."
That was because the ratio of demand and offer were different back then. Starting a publication required a lot of capital and up front investment, so there were only a few publications - and they all had limited spaces (pages) for the ads. However, nowadays anyone can start their publication (website, blog, facebook page, youtube channel) etc for practically free, and they can generate and add any number of pages, videos, etc. - which means that there's an almost unlimited increase in offers (for ad spaces), which in turns lowers prices dramatically.
So, it's not like targeted ads wouldn't work better, than untargeted ones - because they obviously do work a lot better. It's just that the rate they increase efficiency is just nowhere close to be able to compensate for the enormous drop in the prices of ads, that happened for reasons unrelated to them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
