It's an article about potential competitive threats to Google-Meta, not a survey of the entire online advertising industry. The rise of potential competitors is not "nothing".

"Clickbait" can be used with a lot of publications. But in the list of publications it can be applied to... I'd say the Economist would be ranked about dead last. Maybe tied with Der Spiegel.

If I'm understanding baxtr's point, they're saying that the article is attempting to claim a trend without showing enough evidence to point to one. The fact that the competitors have gone from 0% to 25% within 5 years could be evidence that Google/Meta have growing threats, or it could be evidence that their competitors can't grab enough of the market to be sustainable so they die within 5 years, or that they're buying up all of the competition within 5 years of their launch. Google/Meta could have gone from 60% of the market to 75% of the market in the last five years.

So that's the case for the headline claim that they're "under attack" being linkbait. It isn't really affected by how you feel about the Economist's (or even less Der Spiegel's) brand.

Exactly. Thanks for explaining it better than I did.

The title is: “the ad duopoly is under attack”. The term duopoly describes how the market is split: two companies make up the biggest chunk. The article provides no evidence that the market structure has changed. See my comment.

A clickbait can be used by any publication. Apparently, including The Economist.