As someone who has worked in ads in the past, this is exactly what it sounds like. In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking f

As someone who has worked in ads in the past, this is exactly what it sounds like. In advertising, context matters. Ads when you’re in discovery mode looking for things to consume? Great, ads are usually unobtrusive in that context. But there are only so many discovery scenarios but lots of ad money to be made. Advertising is a zero-sum game to dominate the human attention span. This has negative effects on our social lives and mental health. Is saving a few dollars a month worth the societal impact that constant advertising entails? In my opinion this constant barrage of ads is a big part of why we as a society can disagree about basic facts about the world: we’ve been conditioned to consume media that is promoted by virtue of its ability to draw eyeballs through being controversial / shocking, rather than the veracity or value of the information. Ads create a perverse incentive for publishers to operate at the edge of truth because those stories / media get more views.