I've been working on news sites for 7 years. I rarely comment here, but that's a good question.
1. No, I think the opposite. One of the reason that Internet advertising has gotten to this point _because_ smart people don't want to work on it.
2. The history of mass media is tied to the history of advertising. I know its trendy to say things like "the market will innovate" followed by no new ideas. This isn't the answer. The answer is to fix web advertising's problems.
3. I love the writing. I think it matters. I meet people who read my sites all the time and they agree. The survival of this depends on solving a series of really difficult, interesting problems.
Re 2., of course "the market will innovate" is bullshit. The market is perfectly fine with the status quo. Moreover, the market is a system that optimizes for efficiency of making profits and only for this. All those complains about ads are in fact complains about the market being too efficient at extracting profit from users. If we want to use the power of the market to fix abusive ads, we need to destroy their profitability.
At the same time, there are some clearly talented authors of networking code working in advertising (well, at least one). Impressive.
I cannot comment on the idea of "markets" but I can offer an opinion about people. If they can work on what they _want_ to rather than what they believe they _are forced_ to, I think that's cool.
Dennis Ritchie once said in an interview he could have chosen to work on calculating missile trajectories or some similar "difficult, interesting" problem, but instead he chose not to, and ending up working something like C.
I'm not sure anyone asked him to volunteer that information, he just did it. If my curiousity oversteps a line, I apologize. I wish I had the programming talent that I see some people (few) have and I just wonder what it must feel like to have that talent.
1. No, I think the opposite. One of the reason that Internet advertising has gotten to this point _because_ smart people don't want to work on it.
2. The history of mass media is tied to the history of advertising. I know its trendy to say things like "the market will innovate" followed by no new ideas. This isn't the answer. The answer is to fix web advertising's problems.
3. I love the writing. I think it matters. I meet people who read my sites all the time and they agree. The survival of this depends on solving a series of really difficult, interesting problems.
Maybe it's just me, but I think that's cool.