Sure but also consider the amount of advertising: in Television it's pretty standard to have about 2/3 content 1/3 ads: half hour time slots are filled by 21 mi

Sure but also consider the amount of advertising: in Television it's pretty standard to have about 2/3 content 1/3 ads: half hour time slots are filled by 21 minute shows. The article is describing that 50% of the data is spent on ads. And many times the actual page is 90% ads (often video, audio, moving, popups) with a couple sentences of content, wrapped in a clickbait title. Newspaper ads don't shoot loud screaming video in your face that grinds your brain to a halt and covers the content of the paper. Advertisers in the past had to play by some rules. Imagine if a cable TV station ran an illegal ad that destroyed your cable box. That would be unspeakably unacceptable. The TV provider would be crucified, their ratings would tank and they would cease to exist (not to mention legal proceedings) -- stations are accountable for the ads they serve. Now our expectations have degraded to the point where it's somehow okay for a google search for something innocuous to return an ad which is actually a virus. I have a pretty powerful machine and often if I click on a clickbait article it grinds to a complete halt for minutes at a time and crashes the browser. The state of the art in advertising is far, far worse than it has ever been and we're seeing a fundamental shift with the Internet away from accountability in advertising. It's comforting to think that things aren't different from how they used to be, and that there isn't any fundamental difference; well here there absolutely is.