Fortunately, solutions are at hand.
The most obvious solution is to make better ads — ads that engage customers and reward them in exchange for their time and attention. And the less obvious but equally vital solution is to change the metrics that measure an advertisement’s reach. When we tally up an ad’s impressions, we’re looking at an antiquated metric that doesn’t reveal the ad’s true impact.
Impressions are just a vague, unpredictable proxy for what should be deeper results. In the last year I’ve seen all sorts of new standards proposed for ad buying, whether based on time,viewability or verified human interactions. The technology now exists to see, for instance, how much of an ad is visible, or whether the viewer scrolled to the bottom of the page or simply left a window open in a tab and ignored it for hours.
Most eloquently, Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter and now Medium, recently pointed out the folly of using a one-dimensional metric — the number of users — to measure the size of a service. Instagram may have more users than Twitter, Williams said, but Twitter has a much greater impact in the world — and isn’t that something that should be measured and rewarded?