To be fair the web of the early 2000s was full of ads too. I remember a time when people still used Yahoo as their homepage which was basically just a giant ad

To be fair the web of the early 2000s was full of ads too. I remember a time when people still used Yahoo as their homepage which was basically just a giant ad delivery platform with even more invasive ads than we have today. That's not to say that today is much better. It seems like most sites today try to walk the line between ad revenue and user retention.