All this tells us is that advertisers were interested enough to try it. It does not tell us whether or not the ads met their expectations. If they did, this trend will continue, and the next adblocker war can begun. If they did not, that revenue is going to drop.
What Adblock are you going to use when people use the app and the ads come from the same domain as the actual content?
Your own local LLM instructed to strip out product placement / recommendations?
Ask Codex how to filter it!
And if journalists stopped doing "CEO said a thing!" then that would've been in the article itself.
If this is successful, even wildly so, I don’t think it will be enough to make them profitable any time soon. Drop in the bucket for what they really need at this moment in their arc.
Per user generated ads are the high-converting future.