Not arguing for or against these ads, but just to explain a bit how it works (from my modest experience in the industry, maybe some companies do it differently).

Basically the people in charge of monetising the website are from a different team than the publishing team.

I’ve been in meetings with both teams invited, and they basically fight the whole time, the publishing team wants to offer the best user experience, and the monetization team wants to maximize profit. Obviously those are conflicting goals, most of the time.

And that’s when they even have an internal monetization team, because sometimes it’s a third-party company that controls all the ads of a website.

When i talk about the “publishing team”, it often doesn’t include the writer, they are freelance and get orders from a publishing director or something like that.

TL;DR: The schizophrenia is due to a “silo effect” (compartmentalization) with different people working on different goals, that are often conflicting.

One interesting to realize is that when you’re reading free content, you’re not the client, you’re the “product”. Advertisers are the client, and that’s where the publisher’s revenue stream come from.

I like to compare us readers to a farmer’s chicken: he spends most of his time taking care of them, but his goal is to make them as tasty as possible, for his customers.