The Map of 'Winners and Losers' on the Web Reflected by Ad-Ridden Sites: Media in the Zero-Click Era

You open a news app on your smartphone. The list view is clean and easy to read. However, the moment you tap a headline that catches your eye and open the article, it is packed with ads, and you cannot immediately tell where the main text is.

I think many people have become accustomed to this gap, even while feeling frustrated. However, this asymmetry—where the list is clean but the article is full of ads—is not happening by chance. It is a map showing where money and power have shifted on the Web. In this article, I would like to interpret this ad-hell not as a 'degeneration of operators,' but as a manifestation of the very structure in which media is placed in the zero-click era, where traffic from search is disappearing.

Ad-hell is not 'degeneration' but 'acceptance of defeat'

First, it is important to understand that many operators who create ad-ridden sites do not do so because they want to.

In CPM (cost per mille), the mainstream of display advertising, revenue is almost directly linked to the number of impressions, i.e., page views. If the unit price drops, the only way to maintain the same revenue is to increase the number of ads. That is why multiple banners are packed into a single screen, and the boundary with the content begins to dissolve.

Adding to this is the evaporation of traffic from search. According to observations by Values, the percentage of 'zero-clicks'—where users search but do not visit a site—reached a record high of 64.8% in December 2025. The fact that Google's AI Overview began appearing without a login in March 2025 is considered a further contributing factor. Reference:

The impact is clearly visible in the numbers. A September 2025 study by Seer Interactive reported that organic click-through rates dropped by approximately 61% for queries where AI Overviews were displayed (the extent of the decline varies by study, with some estimates putting the overall figure at around 30%). There is also a study finding that 73% of B2B sites experienced a significant decline in traffic between 2024 and 2025. Reference:

The rational choice left for sites that people no longer visit is to recover as much as possible from the small number of visitors who do come. An article page full of ads may not be a product of degeneration, but an honest manifestation of the fact that human readers are no longer the primary customers. Operators unconsciously know that 'people won't come anymore' and are optimizing in a direction that squeezes the maximum out of those who do. This should be called a rational acceptance of defeat.

The gap in readability is a map of winners and losers

Here, I return to the opening question. Why is the list screen clean, while the article page is an ad-hell?

The answer is that the entities owning these two layers are different. The clean list screen is held by the winners of the value chain, namely the platforms. They can earn enough from their own clean surfaces, so they do not need to fill the screen with ads. On the other hand, ad-ridden article pages are prone to becoming places where the side that lost out in this shift scrapes together small change. The gap between readability and unreadability is, as it stands, a map of where money and power have moved.

Market figures point in the same direction. According to an announcement by Dentsu, Japan's internet advertising media spending in 2025 was 3.3093 trillion yen, an increase of 111.8% year-on-year. However, it was video advertising, as well as demand on social media and OTT (video distribution provided via internet lines), that drove this growth. Reference:

In other words, even if the market as a whole is growing, it is the video and platform side where new money is flowing. The areas that publishers who write articles have relied on have not become the protagonists of that growth. Although the pie is getting bigger, the additional portion is sitting at the winners' table. While there are signs of a recovery in display advertising itself, the main drivers of growth remain on the video and platform side. Behind the easy-to-read list, this composition can be seen through.

Cleanliness comes at the cost of 'brand bleaching'

What is even more cruel is that this 'cleanliness' is established at the cost of sacrificing something.

The uniformly arranged list stream looks clean by stripping away the individuality of the source. In the past, the masthead—whether it was Asahi or Yomiuri—carried meaning even for the same news. Which media reported it was part of the information's credibility. However, in today's list screens, the source is shrunk to a small logo or media name and dissolves into a flood of headlines. Readers no longer choose the next piece based on the media, but on the wording of the headline.

Here lies a paradox that is often overlooked. It is said that what will remain last as something difficult to replace by AI is primary information, testimony from those involved, and trust built up over a long period of time—in other words, a brand. However, it is the clean list layer that we evaluate as 'easy to read' that is washing away the brand, which is the vessel of that trust, at the very moment of consumption.

Readability is comfortable. But that comfort is also a device that bleaches the assets needed to survive. In a stream where sources are dissolved, media that did good reporting and low-content summary sites are lined up as grains of the same headline. If the difference in quality becomes invisible, the motivation to invest in quality is also quietly eroded.

The Web's contract is broken, and we have all turned into the 'non-paying side'

Up to this point, it has been about operators and platforms. However, we, the reading side, are also included as parties to this structure.

The advertising model has functioned for over twenty years on a transaction: 'In exchange for providing information for free, we sell your attention to advertisers.' Readers seeing ads was the price paid for free content. However, AI presents only the answer in the form of a summary, cutting out the 'attention' that is the core of that transaction. If the premise that people come to a site and view ads collapses, the transaction itself cannot be sustained. This is not about the skill or lack thereof in individual operators' revenue models, but a much larger issue: the basic contract of the Web is being invalidated. As I wrote previously in 'The Continued Slumification of the Free Internet: Clickbait Thumbnails and the Monetization of Intellect,' the problem was never a binary choice between free or paid. The foundation that made that binary choice possible is what is currently collapsing.

And it is not just AI that is undermining that contract from within. In a survey conducted by Keymake Lab of 1,498 people aged 20 to 70 (from late 2024 to early 2025), 34.3% of respondents had experience using ad blockers. The adoption of browsers equipped with standard ad-blocking features is also progressing. Reference:

People who use ad blockers usually say, 'Because ads are annoying.' I understand that feeling. But if you look only at the behavior, they are blocking the ads that are the operator's only compensation while extracting only the fruit of the content. In that they take the quality without paying the price, it is the exact same structure as what AI is doing.

We often use the phrase 'being polluted by the net' in the context of being a victim. As a victim of being shown things we do not want to see. But if we continue to engage in behavior that we ourselves deem undesirable, and we call that pollution, then perhaps this is not harm inflicted from the outside, but an internalized complicity. Ad blocking is also a modest indulgence to look away from that guilt.

Conclusion: Replacing the Question

Faced with ad-ridden sites, we tend to ask, 'How should we earn money?' or 'Ads or subscriptions?' But if the structure we have examined so far is correct, the real question does not lie there.

Finding ease of viewing pleasant may, in the long run, be killing quality. A clean list is built upon the spoils of the winners and the brands bleached of the losers. If so, what we should be thinking about is not individual revenue tactics, but rather, who will create units of value exchange that do not rely on attention, and how.

Finally, I would like to end by returning the question to myself. When you choose the next article on a list screen, are you choosing it by looking at 'which media outlet reported it'? Or are you concluding the world based solely on the text of the headline? As I touched upon in 'News Available for Free Is Decreasing: What Will Become of the Future of Writers and Media,' the reality of how writers and media outlets will make a living from here on out lies beyond this question. That very sensation of feeling that ease of viewing is comfortable may be the entrance to letting go of the act of choosing. Where the answer to that diverges is likely the deepest part of this problem.