So your in the publishing and content creation business, you've spent years building up your audiences only to now see most of the advertising revenues that used to support your journalist, content editors, back office staff and all those fixed overheads going over to the duopoly of Google and Facebook.

Throw into that heady mix the myriad of middle men in Ad Tech land taking their slice ahead of you, the unabated rise of ad blockers, and advertisers becoming even more aware of the abusive ad fraud industry,  it's no wonder that you're finding it difficult to keep going - Woe is me! 

Behavioral advertising — aka targeted ads — has come to dominate the online ad market, fuelled by platform dynamics encouraging a proliferation of tracking technologies and techniques in the unregulated background. 

A couple of years ago (pre GDPR) circa 86% of ads were using behavourial targeting, a practice which is now becoming more difficult to do as the public grow more aware of how ad tech, and social media companies are using personal data without any real visibility of its value and end use.

This has had the effect of squeezing out non-targeted display ads, such as those that rely on contextual factors to select the ad — e.g. the content being viewed, device type or location.

The latter are now the exception; a fall-back such as for when cookies have been blocked.

To be honest one of the reasons I stopped visiting most of these websites was down to the overload of ads that slowed pages down, it simply made it very difficult to see any of the news for ads.

There is a massive challenge ahead for the industry, without a doubt you/me still want to access our flavour of content on any device in any location, but we don't really want to pay for it, but it can't come free, nothing is free;

So what is the answer, is it to keep interrupting what we are doing with those intrusive adverts, is it to introduce paywalls that people can turn off in an instant, or is there any other viable alternatives out there yet to surface?