Native advertising has been a thing for awhile, and while this is perhaps a specious assumption, I'm guessing there's a reason that it's not more prevalent than

Native advertising has been a thing for awhile, and while this is perhaps a specious assumption, I'm guessing there's a reason that it's not more prevalent than it is. This isn't meant to just be some empty counter, as I totally agree with what you're saying, and I think uBlock's existence is only because the situation kept escalating to the point that we were gifted with complete control over the browser (until Apple and Google took it away...least we still have Firefox for now). My point here is that we've already been through a few arms races with advertisers, and it will continue to be adjusted moving forward. A lot of research has gone into effectiveness of advertising and the best returns on investment for different advertising methods with the current modern web, and despite native advertising being a thing, we still see a huge industry dedicated to the spam-ad model. Youtubers seem to most have moved to Patreon/sponsored videos, but Youtube has metrics for advertisers to note if someone watched the seconds with the advertisement or not as I understand it†, so even this form of native advertising seems to not be so popular with advertisers. In your face pop-ups, attention grabbing videos/banners, and polluted search results seem to be the ones that businesses flock to and that ad agencies sell the best; I seem to recall some article on Facebook ads that the return on investment was pretty bad in most cases. But for all the above, I'm not sure it matters for the end user as there's still only one route to the end user, and it's the browser or apps, and at least on the desktop, there are still browsers you can use to control your online browsing, and if they stop serving their purpose, they can be forked. edit: forgot my footnote. † I'm not an expert on this but the youtuber's I do watch usually half-joke about whether or not people skip the ad sections of the vid, so I'm making a guess there's some ability to track this.