Information overload is now an acute problem, and trust in discerning media providers is increasingly precious. Now there is a race to quality emerging, even as the rest of the Web remains rife with clickbait.
Adblocking—and publisher responses to it—sit at the nexus of two trends: the increasing value of trust in the publisher-consumer relationship, and the emerging conditions of the new information market. The Internet turns many types of information that were once scarce and expensive into overabundant—and therefore cheap—commodities. By corollary, trust and attention have become increasingly valuable. In short: As information becomes cheap, trust becomes precious.