In the pre-internet era, the media property was the centre of the ad universe. You'd call up your local paper to put in an ad, and they'd have control over presentation and pricing, and keep all the revenue. Standards were upheld, and the papers did well.
Now, they're farming out boxes on heir page to middlemen networks. They have little or no control over what ends up there, and they're getting a fraction of the revenue. What's worse, their content, being wide in scope and often full of brand-unfriendly news, isn't hugely friendly to algorithmic targeting paths. The only way to try to stay above water is to run more and more aggressively obnoxious ads.
It's the kind of thing they only get to pull once, and I'd expect them to save that for something huge that would draw an enormous audience to subscribe (something on the level of Stranger Things or Game of Thrones).
Sweet Tooth was nice, but clearly a bit slapped together. They keep the CGI to a minimum, but what's there is pretty cheaply done. The practical effects are nice, but simple in a way that feels like it was done quickly. It's neat that the show was in production before COVID, though I'd be curious to know how much of it was prescient.
The acting is great and the writing pretty good. But it's not going to be a breakout hit. So I'm a bit surprised they'd promote it so hard to attract and audience that will surely say, "Hey, that was OK. Glad I'm already subscribed. But I'm not rushing out to tell my friends about it."
So how do I expect the content creators to make money? I assume there are some people who are watching their ads.
In the digital age, there are a lot of people who decide that we get to price the content however we want. We decide that because they are trying to use terrible ads to make money, that we can just go around that and take their content for free.
That doesn't fly real well with physical products (This loaf of bread is priced at $1, but I only want to pay $0.50, so I'll just give them $0.50 and take it), but seems to be accepted with products that have infinite free reproducibility.
They can put themselves behind a fence, without letting anybody in who doesn't take their flyer. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. They can charge for their bread. That's fine, I'll just skip their bread. No hard feelings on my end, it's all fair. But what they cannot reasonably do is give away free bread and then complain that I won't take their ad flyers.
"Intrusive" doesn't being to describe the modern ad tracking infrastructure, data collection (and attendant leak vulnerabilities), and exploitation.
The pop up ad, autoplay video/audio, and epilepsy-triggering flash ads are just the beginning of the predatory nature of this that has been deeply entrenched as the biggest companies that effectively make up the modern consumer web rely on this for their massive revenues.
It is orwellian in every sense of the word, not just dangerous for individuals in a data privacy and identity theft perspective, and dangerous at the civilization/society level in that it is a direct threat to a free, liberal, and democratic world.
Advertising was already a dangerous psychological influence back in the era of print ads. Now that we are essentially entering the first cybernetic era with our online personas and screen time, it is directly manipulating personality, mental stability, opinion, and belief.
You know how you avoid all those ads? You avoid their site.
Steal their content and publish it elsewhere, such as in posts on Reddit or HN.
Trying to paint anything black or white will just lead to a model that doesn't represent reality and what people are going to do.
It's nonsensical to equate being shown an ad (even in this third party tracking day and age) with victimhood.
Histrionics aren't the answer.
It's not "showing" an ad. It's a popup ad, with a tracking cookie, with a stored identity and list of urls tracked over years, tied and shared to a dozen databases, probably shared with governments (willingly or otherwise).
I get a huge percentage of people on HN work for FAANG and are a part of this meat grinder, so go ahead and downvote. But blaming a consumer for not wanting to be tracked and characterizing it as them being cheap is shifting blame to the consumer. Which is victim blaming.