I think advertising is a necessity, but like many things, there's an expected boundary in place for where, how and how often you expect ads. Take TV for exampl

I think advertising is a necessity, but like many things, there's an expected boundary in place for where, how and how often you expect ads. Take TV for example; advertising is expected during commercial breaks, which are clearly marked as such, around here are regulated for the public TV channels (so they can't interrupt regular programming) and have an explicit intro/outro segment to make it clear when regular programming resumes. Radio follows similar rules here. Same with things like magazine ads; they're marked as separate from the page, usually explicitly don't follow the magazines style and are usually only a small part of the magazine. By contrast, digital advertising's most insidious trick is that no such boundaries exist. Ads must be shoved everywhere in as many places as possible. You got some whitespace? Fill it with ads, ads and even more ads. People use adblockers? Directly insert your ad into the content and call it a sponsorship. People are looking at ads? We gotta track all of it so we can allegedly improve the clickthrough ratio and profile them, privacy be damned. It's an industry entirely based on taking a hand when offered a finger to make a line go up. Ads aren't inherently the problem, the entire problem is the gluttony, greed and avarice that's embedded in the digital ads industry. (Which is funny given how much digital ad payout rates are a seeming race to the bottom, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if most sites that run ads still aren't even sustained by them anymore.)