Ask HN: Is the advertising funded model for Internet content likely to last?
I believe in the future we will move more toward a subscription funded model due to privacy concerns and people desiring higher quality content.
As for the lucrative nature of advertising, and it's future - I see it being diminished, if for no other reason than people are increasingly using ad blockers. Why are they using ad blockers? I think for most people it's just about the visual clutter that ads create.
Online advertising is moving towards server based technology as the insanity of header bidding comes to a head. This will mean an increasing number of ads being served with less information about the end user (server based ads still allow for defining user information, and user cookies will continue to exist for users who aren't blocking ads.)
I think advertisers should focus more on native ads -- embedding ad content directly into the existing application's UI -- instead of building their own creatives, and develop some model for determining CPM partially based on how it looks in the app. Part of the reason why people hate ads today is because they look like ads. The more work publishers can put in to making ads look nice on their website (within the applicable regulations -- ads should still be labelled as such), the more likely I think people will be in accepting them.
As for subscription models.. yeah, they're gonna grow - but they're not a perfect solution either. Google has a backup, Google Contributor, which I think is a really interesting idea (and Google isn't the only company to execute on that idea) but it's still really hard to get people to assign value to a website visit.