I suspect a lot of it comes from the inversion of the ad marketplace. In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd cal

I suspect a lot of it comes from the inversion of the ad marketplace. In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well. Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.