Well it's not like they didn't know that people hate ad networks, hate getting tracked the shit out of them, hate downloading 5MB of mysterious JS to read a 2kB

Well it's not like they didn't know that people hate ad networks, hate getting tracked the shit out of them, hate downloading 5MB of mysterious JS to read a 2kB article. The sliminess of the online advertising industry wasn't a secret 10 years ago or something. So don't talk about it as if they ever were an ethical source of business income. (Not just talking about all the lying that is inherent in advertising, print ads suffer from that too) They never were, they're not like inert pieces of your magazine. They're little pieces of software doing whatever the fuck it likes, control that you offer to semi-anonymous parties over your readers. Imagine if a print newspaper didn't just sell ad space in their print, but whoever buys the ad also determines what ink it is printed with. And the ink can be any substance! Sometimes it's ink, sometimes it's poop, sometimes it's smallpox, sometimes it's radioactive. I mean, MOST of the time it's really just ink, with only a tiny amount of aerosolized heroin, just your average respectable ads. But every once in a while, and there is really nothing to do but hope it happens to the other paper first, it'll really harm the reader. I mean you can't really expect a news magazine to check all the ink its printed with right, just doesn't scale.