Criticism of digital advertising and tips for better ROI

We need to talk about this. Digital advertising in 2026 feels more and more like a pyramid scheme. Not because advertisers have bad intentions, but because the entire system has been built for years on the wrong foundations: clicks, views and volume. And today we are paying the price for that.

How it all began: attention as currency

Advertising on the internet started with a simple logic: whoever attracts attention can sell. But what once began with banners on the side of news websites has since become an intrusive cocktail of pop-ups, pre-rolls, cookies, trackers and content written solely to please the algorithms.

“Ad blocking solutions were expected to cost publishers $54 billion in lost advertising revenue in 2024, accounting for approximately 8% of total digital advertising spend.”

— Blockthrough Research Team, Publisher Revenue Analysis

Look at the average B2B company today. You see banners nobody clicks, whitepapers nobody reads, and sponsored content so generic it could have come from an AI copywriter from 2019. Meanwhile users are flooded with messages, but rarely feel addressed.

The real problem? Laziness disguised as strategy

Digital advertising has become lazy. The model rewards superficiality. A pageview? Good, here is your CPM. Whether someone actually read the piece or even stayed for a second does not matter. Let alone whether it had any impact.

The result: a landscape full of digital noise. And users who are getting better and better at ignoring that noise. Ad blockers, cookie banners, skip buttons… These are not accidental trends, they are self-defence mechanisms against a polluted ecosystem.

“Globally, 31.5% of internet users use ad blockers at least sometimes when online, with more than 912 million ad-blocking users worldwide in Q2 2023.”

— GWI & Blockthrough, Global Internet Usage Research

The reader is not the problem. We are.

When websites beg you to turn off your ad blocker because you are ‘destroying their journalism’, they mostly show how dependent they have become on a model that no longer works. The truth is: people do not hate ads. They hate irrelevant, intrusive, slow-loading ads that add nothing.

The problem is therefore not the user, but the fact that we have started making content for algorithms instead of for people. We build sites for robots and measure success with numbers that say nothing about real impact.

“Nearly a third of Americans (32.2%) use ad blockers, with desktop leading at 37% and men blocking more ads than women (49% vs 33%).”

— Cropink Research Team, US Digital Behavior Study

What instead? Building ownership, trust and relevance

The way forward is not easy, but it is clear. Any brand that wants to survive must treat content as a product, not as a marketing trick.

• Make content that helps your target audience, not disturbs it. Clear formats, persona segmentation, valuable insights, no nonsense.
• Optimise not for views but for interaction. Scroll depth, time on page, returning visitors: those numbers say something about relevance.
• Use retargeting with moderation and respect. If someone showed interest, give them a reason to return. No spam.
• Make sure your UX is frictionless. Users do not want a mess of banners, sidebars, trackers and autoplay videos. They want speed, clarity, simplicity.
• Invest in owned assets. Think valuable evergreen content, a strong newsletter, templates, tools, podcasts or gated hubs. Build an ecosystem people voluntarily return to.

“The most cited reason for ad blocking is that websites are more manageable without banners, but consumers also want to avoid irrelevant or offensive messages and prevent tracking.”

— Statista Research Team, Consumer Behavior Analysis

Advertising is not dead, but it must be reinvented

The shift we are experiencing now is painful but necessary. Anyone who continues to pump budget into generic banners and display ads without strategy today is burning more than just money: you are damaging your brand trust.

The future belongs to brands that dare to choose long-term thinking. That invest in authority, relevance and empathy. That understand that trust is the new reach. And that the only metric that counts is: do they come back?

So let us stop buying attention and start earning attention.

“Advertisers reported a 22% decline in return on investment (ROI) for digital campaigns in markets with high ad-blocking rates.”

— HubSpot Research Team, Digital Advertising ROI Study

Want to build sustainable marketing results as a Belgian SME that actually work? Then it is time for a different approach. At ClickForest we are happy to help you leave that old model behind.