How has advertising got so bottom-feeder and no one seems to care - this is your brand guys !
Install something like uBlock or uMatrix (or both) and then put them in permissive mode. You'll see about 48 domains connected in uBlock.
That's a lot of 3rd party domains to deliver content; digging down, about 2 are related to the content, and the remainder are ad networks and social garbage.
All to serve about 20k of text. As many others have noted, there's something really wrong with the web. It's not just their brand, it's everybody's.
Note: I work for a newspaper company.
I guess the answer is economics, but just don't go onto remnant networks.
But yes, there is something very wrong - but it's been wrong since banner ads were cool. I think it's not the tragedy of the commons but rather the profitability of the commons. Common ownership is not inherently profitable, even if it is inherently valuable.
Maybe adblockers are the right answer. We shall see in ios9 I guess.
I'd love to see ads go away, but we might as well start by eliminating the scum first.
Honestly, ad devs are some of the savviest javascript developers out there. We have a lot of constraints and need to move fast and scrappy on a daily basis.
I won't be doing it forever however it's one of those things that holds my interest until i get in my car and go home for the day.
* I work for a very large company that own radio & publishing properties.
So the model for reddit and HN is to charge for access, and pass on to the articles clicked through to. However in that game, I would pay NYT a long time before I paid Reddit.
Reddit and hn are entirely different: they pay nobody to produce content, nor do they charge for access.
Production will be valuable - but the curation is the secret sauce.