That is silly, so I see why /r/technology liked it.
Of course lots of ads are never seen. Lots of newspaper ads and magazine ads -- if you were to count each individual printing of the ad as its own entity -- are never seen by a human being before the thing ends up in the recycling bin.
This is completely separate from the old saying in marketing, "half my advertising budget is completely wasted, but I don't know which half." That's saying that half of all ad buys are completely worthless.
The only thing Google did wrong was to actually measure if their ads were viewable (for more than a second, mind you).
It's obviously difficult to generalize about ads and I don't think ads were the way to promote Dr. Dobbs.
My personal experience with Google AdWords (take it as an anecdote) is depressing. 10 years ago I had a real and measurable ROI using it. Fastforward a few years and I didn't receive a single customer from them until one day I turned off all my campaigns. In parallel I received many customers from our blog articles, links, etc.
There is another force against ads: AdBlock. The use of adblockers is growing, more in our field.
