It's one of the easiest businesses to optimise for revenue/profit, so I'm pretty sure that the the current situation is at least a significant local minimum. At

It's one of the easiest businesses to optimise for revenue/profit, so I'm pretty sure that the the current situation is at least a significant local minimum. At this point, many publishers have run trials with more/less, intrusive/low-key ads and any other variable you can think of. There are maybe some publishers who found success with running ads only very selectively, but those are usually very small (The Deck, i. e. daring fireball comes to mind). Large, high-quality publications such as the new York Times are somewhere in the middle: ads that include animation, but don't obscure content, and not spam or fraud. For the mass of publishers without a famous brand name, the low-quality ads they're running are probably the best they can do. And ads do bring in significant revenue, although it's too little to offset the losses in print.