It definitely is, says Professor Eric Clemons from The Wharton School.

In this TechCrunch piece , Clemons argues that the drop in Internet advertising was not unpredictable and was always going to happen. The reality, he says, is that people on the Net are not the same passive audience you find watching television or reading a newspaper.

"Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them," Clemons writes. "It's not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind."

Clemons argument makes a lot of sense with one newspaper after the other going out of business, broadcast media struggling and advertising revenues falling. But I struggle with it because advertising is driving Google and there is no sign that's going to let up.

Clemons however argues that Google's model is based on "misdirection" where customers are sent to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. Misdirection, he says, is simply not sustainable.

The jury is still out on that one.