Walt Mossberg, writing at The Verge:
The excessive length and lackluster content of that football ad is but one example of the poor use of ads all over the internet. And that situation is behind the rise in ad-blocking software and the quiet concern about business models at some content sites.
Too often poorly executed, annoying, code-heavy, privacy-invading ads clutter websites and apps — especially on mobile or the News Feed on Facebook, where content increasingly is consumed without requiring the reader or viewer to even visit the originating site.
And:
About a week after our launch, I was seated at a dinner next to a major advertising executive. He complimented me on our new site’s quality and on that of a predecessor site we had created and run, AllThingsD.com. I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.
Holy shit.