....in order to comply with Google Ads, on which the site runs. NC has been around for years, I'm surprised they haven't moved to a patronage model of some sort

....in order to comply with Google Ads, on which the site runs. NC has been around for years, I'm surprised they haven't moved to a patronage model of some sort. It's worth reading the actual criticism, but the clickbait headline implies that you are talking about Google impacting the site's organic search ranking.