Apart from the security aspects (and Forbes' responsibility therein), I'd like to say something about an argument I hear often in this context: That without pay

Apart from the security aspects (and Forbes' responsibility therein), I'd like to say something about an argument I hear often in this context: That without payment via advertising, the "quality content"-writers won't have a reason to produce more quality content and it will dry up (or something; the actual consequences are often left to the imagination). Consider clickbait. Consider listicles, blogspam, the "you'll never guess X these celebrities Y", reposts of photos of cool-seeming-yet-utterly-impractical things to do with food/furniture/clothing/lifestyle/health/etc. At some point you probably helped clean out a friends' Windows laptop, tried to Google whether some process or application is useful or safe to remove--yeah those sites. I can't list all the types and categories, there's hundreds. The only reason trash like this even exists, the only way this unfathomable high-volume fire-hose of vapidity is made possible, is because of these advertising networks. This is what the vast majority of all those advertising dollars buys us. Who is more likely to stop producing content if advertising revenue disappears? The high-volume low-effort clickbait-linkspam writers, or the "quality content" writers that actually care about the things they write about? I'm convinced that if the online advertising industry were to collapse some day (I can hope, but I doubt it'll happen), it will be a net-positive for ALL the content online. Not just because an Internet without advertisement is just so much nicer, but also because the clickbait writers will be the first to stop producing "content", because unlike the quality writers that care, there will be exactly zero reason for them to continue producing informational landfill.