Lily Hay Newman, writing at Wired:
These redirects can show up seemingly out of the blue when you’re in a mobile browser like Chrome, or even when you’re using a service like Facebook or Twitter and navigating to a page through one of their in-app browsers. Suddenly you go from loading a news article to wriggling away from an intrusive ad. What enables these ad redirects to haunt virtually any browser or app at any time, rather than just the sketchy backwaters in which they used to roam? Third-party ad servers that either don’t vet ad submissions properly for the JavaScript components that could cause redirects, or get duped by innocent-looking ads that hide their sketchy code.
Not a day goes by that I don’t get pitched some variation of these kinds of ads for this website. They promise thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and it seems like a lot of big websites are saying yes to these third party ad networks. I think it’s killing the internet.