I guess this might be the future of the banner ad. MarketBanker – The Internet’s Ad Marketplace

Once you boil it down to a commodity (with a nearly infinite supply and a close to zero clickthrough rate) it becomes clear that making money on the web by selling banners is awfully difficult. (I wrote about this in 1998–when I claimed in Fast Company that banners were doomed by the year 2000. I was early, but not wrong).

The insight of Adwords and other keyword buys is this: These are relevant ads that Google (and others) have TRAINED the user that it’s useful to click on.

Google will fire you as a client if your ad doesn’t get good clicks. The reason is obvious: they only win when you leave the site, and ads where people don’t click don’t work.

I hope and wish that one day we’ll have a viable model for supporting content-based web sites with advertising. But it’s pretty obvious that today we don’t. (pintshop.com is the site the headline refers to).