The first banner ads were certainly less annoying; but since I definitely remember my reaction to seeing Canter+Siegel posts... I'd still say online advertising has always been relatively obnoxious.

I personally tend to think your framing is letting the publishers sneak a bit out of frame, though. Publisher in this context refers to an entity that has a site or app that attracts eyeballs into which ads may be emitted.

Once upon a time, as you're mentioning, sites had only a few rectangles and skyscrapers that they had to sell themselves. By and large any site capable of bringing in real money had to hire ad sales folks to sell those slots (yes, to real ad agencies!). Some others would join consortiums to split the cost of ad sales folks, etc.

Those publishers needed to hire programmers in addition to those ad sales folks to develop targeting tools in order to make better pitches to the ad agencies. This was similar to how "old media" (newspapers, radio, and television companies) used to do it: you had to create spaces for ads (commercial==ad slot), go out and find people who wanted to buy those slots, and then rent them your ad space (and, of course, the eyeballs associated them).

All of that costs effort and money... plus ad agencies are also expensive so only "reputable" brands had ad budgets that could move the needle. This meant the publisher's content had to be something a reputable company would want to be associated with. That's even more costs for the publisher; i.e. not just hiring programmers and sales folks, but editors and actual journalists, etc.

Your incentive in this game is to produce content which can attract reputable merchants by having an audience that those deep pocketed merchants want to reach. Or, otherwise, to become so popular and well read that the advertisers would naturally want to pay you.

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So, what changed?

Even with ace ad sales folks most publishers couldn't actually sell all of their available slots (side note: anyone seen a real house ad in the last few years!)

Enter... "Remnant advertising." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remnant_advertising)

What if a company offered to pay you for all of your unused slots?

You're not going to get a huge contract like a run-of-site takeover campaign, and in fact you no longer have any relationship with the advertiser at all, just with the remnant ad broker.

But they will toss you a few pennies every time you can scrounge together 1000 eyeballs. Kind of like pull tabs or collecting aluminum cans, it's now a volume game.

But, consider what became of the incentives for the publisher: you no longer have to get great or respectable content or become super popular so "respectable" merchants will pay you... you can just focus on the numerator now: eyeballs == money.

In fact, with that incentive system you might start shoving modal dialogs and interstitials and just plain adding ad slots everywhere! If you can sell the same eyeball a dozen times instead of once that's even more money! So... ad slots took over the web, and you suddenly had to scroll a lot more.

Note that I haven't once talked about the content of the advertisements themselves just how inexorably the dynamics of this market lead to more obnoxious webpages and apps into which those ads (good or bad) would appear.

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What about the remnant merchants? Well, they hired sales people and programmers. And then they consolidated, and merged, and consolidated some more.

And they'd built software to schedule campaigns and produce the targeting reports for publishers and ad agencies to do remnant! Plus ad agencies preferred not having to deal with 1,000 websites if they could just work with a few brokers.

The BMWs, PepsiCo's, Unilevers were all still hiring ad agencies to design campaigns; but now everyone worked with the ad brokers.

But for the publishers,not only do you not hire programmers and ad sales folks, you don't really need editors or to pay your "journalists" much... You might even just pay your "content creators" based on how many eyeballs their arti^h^h^h^hlist-icle brings in. The publishers could become brokers of eyeballs too!

If you're keeping score we're now in the rapid descent phase... tragically you've no longer got a newspaper or an essayist or a journalist or whatever... just a bunch of dealers trying to sell eyeballs.

Of course kutsunesoba's right that the advertisers (folks with ads looking for eyeballs) were also complicit, though. They quickly realized they were competing with 10 other ads appearing on the same and this meant almost instant neon-disco-ball obnoxious ads!

But, from my perspective, in addition to the scuzzy advertisers, and those scummy ad brokers, all this time swimming right alongside them were the publishers.

And this whole article is about one of them (being upset with Apple).