This is very interesting.

Recently I was discussing the slow decay of Advertising. What I see happening now is that to most people, ads don’t work. They don’t contribute anything except noise and annoyance. When you google something like “Best Garden Shears”, as an example, the list of websites is functionally mulch. It’s not useful, it’s hyper-seo ad spam linking back to Amazon. People don’t trust these google listings, and the alternative is asking a community, or your real life friends, what they prefer in terms of garden shears.

The Cozy Web is fundamentally (partially) that, right - a collection of people who can share their opinions about things in a space where you trust that information. AdTech cannot survive this.

I believe such a cozy web will remain resilient - but I also envision a future where adBot “infiltrators” try to smooze their way into such spaces in order to spout the same garbage.

For a comedic take on this vision, cc: for profit online university