I think this development is nothing less than wonderful for the consumer.

I think Clemons makes two crucial points in saying that we don’t want/trust ads, and we don’t need them. In reality, we’ve never wanted/trusted them, but we were a passive audience and had to sit through them. Now we’re active, and we generate our own content, including reviews which are generally far more helpful than ads.

If you’re interested, I wrote a longer piece about this here:

http://www.whyweworry.com/blog/2009/06/29/why-advertising-will-fail-on-the-internet/

Online Digital Trackable Advertising is a major trend in the market place and at 8% saturation means it is approaching the strong growth in the S-Curve. It is predicted that it takes 50% of the time to reach 10% and the other 50% of the time to reach 90%. So far, roughly 10 years have passed with online advertising and that means that by 2020 we should be at or close to 90% of all advertising budgets using some or all online advertising for marketing.

There are many smaller players in the market that have not surfaced yet that are experiencing major growth such as FreeKii.com and as these grow and share the market for online advertising it skews the growth rate since they may not be included in top players for growth calculation.

The actual rate of growth in the next few years will be incredible and will make the last 10 years look pale in comparison. Remember the auto industry 100 years ago?