Until recently, I’d have said that internet advertising was doing its best to imitate a dinosaur and was facing extinction.

Of course, the major ad players would beg to differ and certainly Google make a nice amount of money from the adverts at the top of their search results.

But “lesser” sites (by which I mean almost any other site) are struggling.

The more they pester us, the more inclined we are to thwart their attempts with ad blockers. Because it’s nice to view pages without auto play videos or pop ups littering our screens. That’s extra true on mobile phones where download speeds aren’t always as fast as they are at home and where screen space is at a premium.

Personally it’s rare for me to be persuaded to un-block ads.

I don’t object to adverts on principle, just they way they push the content that I wanted to read or watch further and further from the limelight and it’s almost as though I have to sift through the ads before I get to the content I clicked to read or watch in the first place.

Back when I was young, adverts were almost unavoidable. With no TV recording or live pause or fast forward, the only way to avoid the adverts was to physically leave the room.

With newspapers and magazines, adverts were on almost every page although you could skim past them easier than walking out of a room or walking across to the television to change channel. That’s still the case with most print publications and the position of the ads is still critical for response. Most people are right handed which is why more adverts appear on the right hand pages.

One of the reasons I’m not against advertising is that I’d have been into computers a lot later than I actually was if it wasn’t for adverts.

Adverts in magazines I was reading had multi-page adverts for these new fangled computer things. I read the adverts as though they were actual magazine features – willingly and knowingly.

And I think we’re almost coming back to that with Facebook’s sponsored posts.

They’re there and – so long as the advertiser has been at least a bit savvy – they’re reasonably relevant to me.

Nice one.

Facebook makes it easy to do this – they’ve got much more data available than Google and because their ecosystem is more “closed” they can keep things a lot tighter/

So maybe internet advertising is doing something the dinosaurs didn’t do – evolving.

And, if that’s the case, we need to evolve with it.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this in the comments below.