My take on ads is this: I’ve been using the internet since 1989 - before search engines, advertising, SLIP/PPP/ADSL, etc.
When ads began to appear on websites in the late 90s, I was OK with it. A banner ad here, etc. Then they started to move. And flash. And make noise. And then popups, and pop-unders.
At that point I started to BLOCK THEM ALL. If your business model is a game of distraction from the site I’m visiting, then fuck you, your family, and anyone you’ve ever met.
Moving on to UI web-based stuff, the demise of excellent sites like AltaVista (with its superior search syntax) and the growth of Goooooooogle (with its astonishingly and intentionally shit search syntax), the progress and intention was obvious.
There was a brief period where Google, etc, provided what people wanted. But that time has passed. Now it’s all in on GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.
tl;dr: Once advertisers started to behave like gambling sites, they were yeeted to the hell in which they belong.
Le petit mort , ahem, comes in many forms…