I have a certain amount of sympathy for ads because I know how expensive running a website is becoming. Google's continued push for faster and faster speeds, even for people using mobile devices with 3G, will eventually limit website sponsorship to large corporations and the wealthy. Ads could be a way of offsetting the increasing financial costs, at least for a while.
Not to mention regulations that, unless Congress acts to change things (they dropped the ball the last time it came up), will affect essentially every site that sells stuff. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect this will apply to author sites as well. Sad thing is that most people are unaware of some of these regulations until predatory lawyers strike.
On the subject of ads, I was never a fan of ad-blocking services. I remember when people complained about banner ads. I never had a problem with them. Easy enough to scroll past and ignore if you weren't interested. And I've used banner ads myself.
Anymore, banner ads are tame by comparison of what goes on now. It seems to me that a lot of sites these days have more ads than actual content, and that's not counting the sites that exist purely as clickbait where they will have a "story" posted with one sentence and a photo on a page and you have to click and click and click to read the whole thing. And each page is stuffed with ads. And, typically, it's not like these sites created the content. Obviously, I haven't researched them all, but a number of times I've tracked down where a story originated and it will have been a reddit thread or something similar. Now, did these clickbait sites license the photographs? Maybe, but I highly doubt it. So, a lot of these clickbait sites are, I suspect, making money off of ads placed alongside content they neither created nor licensed.
And that is frustrating because it seems too often when people are sued over copyright infringement, it's the blogger that posted a newspaper clipping or some such thing and not these huge sites that are basically one big collection of potential copyright infringement lawsuits.
Outside of that, too many sites have way too many ads. I don't mind advertising. I don't mind site owners using ads to generate income, but when the ads outweigh the content, you've gone too far.
And newspapers, the ones that complain loudly about how the Internet has ruined the industry, I think sometimes have only themselves to blame. I have seen too many newspaper sites with these dodgy ads running, the ones like
Shoe and others have described. If you're trying to promote responsible journalism, having ads with sketchy claims and assorted nonsense does not help your cause. Maybe it helps with money in the short term but over the long term it's demoting journalism, in my opinion. And there are newspaper sites I've seen with expanding banner ads at the top and if you accidentally run your mouse over them, they expand and cover the content you're trying to read. And then you have to ask yourself whether the newspaper values the advertising more than the content because if the ads is masking the content and I have to scroll back and click the stupid ad closed, that's a bad reader experience. Why would I want to go back to that site again?
And pop-up videos, ad or not, those are annoying. If I want to watch the video, I will watch the video. I don't like videos that popup in the corner and start playing and then often won't stop even if you click the "X" and then sometimes you click the "X" multiple times trying to get the stupid thing to close and then it closes and registers one of those clicks as clicking on the ad beneath the video and then you end up loading an ad you were never interested in because you were trying to get rid of a video you never wanted to watch. And then the videos sometimes float in the corner, covering up content. Ugh.
But, anyway, I suppose I digress. The bottom line is that, these days, it's just too much. Way too much advertising. It's also why, for the first time, I am actually considering using an ad blocker. I'm looking at one that I can install on my network and block ads/sites from all devices rather than installing ad blockers individually on each device.
Maybe it will cost some sites ad revenue--not me individually but collectively from all of us using or who will be using ad blockers--but they really have only themselves to blame because they've gone too far, I think.
The ones I will feel sorry for are the sites that didn't go overboard with ads who will be losing ad revenue from ad blockers due to all those other sites that took it too far. It's always the little guy that pays, not the big fish that cause the actual problems.