Perhaps it is not so much a question of whether online ads work nor how profitable the business is (or the costs to society of all the surveillance), but instead the question is why the author cannot or will not work on something else. Is the work he does truly valuable in a general sense. This question might help us gauge the veracity of his statements.
If the web were 100% ad-free, it would still exist. It would still be growing. People would still spend countless hours working on computer programming. People would still be endlessly tinkering with the internet. This is reality, I saw it in the 80's and 90's. However, they would not be, as the author is today, asking for forgiveness, pledging to donate half their "earnings" to charity. Online ads may be an efficient way to make money but it also may be the only efficient way to make money from such "work" (experimentation, fun). The folks who are profiting from online ads will say anything to avoid that reality check.
The emperor may indeed be naked, but the amount of money and infrastructure these companies have to bury the truth is enormous. They will not allow the world to ever again experience a web without pervasive advertising. The person who started the web already had a real job. He did not try to make money with online ads. That world was fun while it lasted. There were so many possibilities.
Thanks to this author's "work", the possibilities now appear to be mostly dystopian. Compare this post "Why I work on Ads" to the original paper from Brin and Page that described the influence of advertising on web search as undesirable and a primary motivation for creating Google.
If the web were 100% ad-free, it would still exist. It would still be growing. People would still spend countless hours working on computer programming. People would still be endlessly tinkering with the internet. This is reality, I saw it in the 80's and 90's. However, they would not be, as the author is today, asking for forgiveness, pledging to donate half their "earnings" to charity. Online ads may be an efficient way to make money but it also may be the only efficient way to make money from such "work" (experimentation, fun). The folks who are profiting from online ads will say anything to avoid that reality check.
The emperor may indeed be naked, but the amount of money and infrastructure these companies have to bury the truth is enormous. They will not allow the world to ever again experience a web without pervasive advertising. The person who started the web already had a real job. He did not try to make money with online ads. That world was fun while it lasted. There were so many possibilities.
Thanks to this author's "work", the possibilities now appear to be mostly dystopian. Compare this post "Why I work on Ads" to the original paper from Brin and Page that described the influence of advertising on web search as undesirable and a primary motivation for creating Google.
http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/334.pdf