15 Questions About Online Advertising

The real question of course is: Does online advertising work? Unfortunately, it's impossible to give a simple answer to this apparently straightforward question. For starters, this is not a single question, but at least three different ones, as we shall see. The right question to ask would be: for whom does online advertising work? But even before we try to answer this question, we need to define what we're talking about: banner ads; not search ads, nor classified ads. Then we need to ask ourselves how online advertising started, what it was supposed to be like if it worked out as advertised, why it went astray, why it's still around, what it has come etc.