The psychological reasons for these predictions are relatively simple: many people wish paid search would just go away. It's troubling to observers who don't like new things and want to turn the conversations back to older ad models. It's also troubling to people who, since the free lunch of organic search referrals and the odd viral success began, do not think marketers should pay for anything. (In this regard, see Godin's post of yesterday, Clutter. Does Rubel understand search beyond his own reaction to a single SERP? Google monetizes less than 60% of all queries, and has a consistent place they slot ads: in the top premium spot and right-hand margin. By and large, users have been trained to see the sponsored results as commercially-oriented, and organic listings as, well, something else. The consistency of this method is such that users have been seeing fairly similar screen layouts for more than five years. Why call clutter on Google now? If it's a relevant listing, tailored to a potential searcher's needs, it isn't clutter.
Marketers are Trying Other Things. People are discovering the online world beyond search. As they should. Whether this means money flees search (when the ROAS is locked in and screams "profit" to decisionmakers -- they're making money, not "spending" it) is an extremely dubious proposition. Likely this would be more than made up for by the declines in wasteful television, print, and other traditional, sometimes overpriced media.
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