What's particularly odd is that some articles have no ads at all. Some have the same ad repeated literally 3-5 times in a short 1,000 word article. And the ads are all trash. They seem like those awful chum-boxes you see on web sites. Who in their right mind thought this would be appealing to the typical Apple user? I mean, regardless, I have never intentionally clicked on any ad on the web in 30 years, and I'm not going to start now.
It's sad because it's exposed me to regional newspapers from around the world. I live in California and see articles from newspapers in Idaho, Utah, Connecticut, upstate New York, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, etc. and even from other (mostly English-speaking) countries like Canada, England, Ireland, Isreal, and Australia. They even include some (English-language) stuff from China. I don't normally see news sources that diverse on the web because it takes more effort. But the ads just make it not worth it to continue using.
The news articles in the main view are just top business stories from Apple News. I don't see anything ad like at all, actually.