Good grief you lot should get out more, it's Friday night. Oh wait, erm, hang on
Anyhoo, all this morose pessimism about how advertising will make the net a worse experience (I have to use that word, sullied as it has recently become, since I can not bring myself to call a communications medium a 'place') is making me all misty eyed and nostalgic for the early nineties, a time frame which contained, amongst other harbingers of allegedly certain net.doom, the year september never ended (1993), the first banner ads (same year) which caused untold controvesy and Canter and Siegel's mass "Green Card" usenet spam (1994). Truly it was the dawn of mass adoption of the web, and of the web based advertising model that we know and love.
(the younger, or more recent netizens, amongst you may need to pause to look some of that up
)
Wired raved about the "New Economy" (an economy of
eyeballs, which is a pretty creepy kind of economy, eyyeew!), and used lots of great sounding phrases like "Paradigm shift". Wired's readers complained to their opticians about eyestrain headaches, and the internet's user communities filled emails, usenet postings, web pages and magazine articles by the thousands with their vocal cries of horror that the net would never be the same again, that it would be awful, would become useless and unusable. That it would be
broken 
To them it seemed as though the sky was falling.
I know this, I was there, I was one of those voices, I remember it as though it were yesterday, possibly because I have spent so much of the intervening period in various states of intoxication
And you know what, the net is still here, the web is bigger, brighter, better, faster and far far more useful than it was.
We were right, the net was never the same (it was stupid of us to think that it would be, change is truly one of the only two really universal constants)
But we were wrong about the sky. 