The article is a bit strange. Is this really anything new? What you describe has been happening since at least the 1890s, where text heavy, low value adverts ap

The article is a bit strange. Is this really anything new? What you describe has been happening since at least the 1890s, where text heavy, low value adverts appeared in newspapers and magazines. The metric and the medium may have changed, but fundamentally the same thing was happening. Somewhere along the line (probably with the demise of AOL) it was decided that the model of the internet wasn't going to be such that we paid a subscription for the content we consume, but that the model would be akin to freesheets and completely ad funded. It's natural that people who invest in that kind of advertising are going to want some kind of metrics in return, and probably also natural that publishers will try to optimize for that metric too.