The state of web ads is over a century in the making
Preface: I was originally going to go on a rant but fell down a rabbit hole of looking at examples of older newspapers and instead this became more of an article/blog.
Like many other people focused on their privacy, I run Pi-hole at home to block advertising domains, among other annoyances, and personally make extensive use of Privacy Badger and NoScript. The Pi-hole alone has the effect whenever anyone of the household is out of the building and not connected to our home's wifi, they get the jarring experience of seeing a completely different version of the web, plastered with ads, most of which are animated and attention-grabbing. This is especially true in mobile apps.
There's been a lot of lip service given to the way the “old web” used to appear versus how things are now, so I'm not going to do more of that here. I think what a lot of us “web old-timers” maybe don't realize is that how the web looks now is actually pretty common and has its origins in the way newspapers and magazines were laid out in the past.