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Carbon Ads has pretty solid CTR, ads perform, advertisers renew, etc. It's not all doom and gloom for online advertising when you respect users and work hard to combine quality advertisers and publishers.

It works with intent but "intent" is really only available to Bing, Google, etc. where the user is searching for something _specific_ to purchase.

For instance someone googling reviews of Samsung Dryers probably is considering buying a dryer of some kind.

The further you get from that initial intent the less valuable your ads are until they are basically worthless.

CTR isn't the only KPI by which ads are sold. These days, publishers understand that ads still influence even if normal users don't actually click. When a purchase is preceded by an impression from my ad network, in some cases I can get credit for a portion of it.

Agree that CTR isn't the main metric that matters from a business perspective, but it's the one to verify the statement "no one clicks on banners".

Isn't that the wrong question?

what I'd really like to know is whether banners are a worthwhile investment, not if they get clicked on.