I would love to see a company compete in the ad space with the goal of making ads less intrusive. If ads didn't attack me and cause the viewport to jump and become obscured while reading, my first impression with the products would be better, and the sites the ads are on would get more viewership.

Quality ads would be at a huge premium.

Web ads are bearable for me most of the time, but I'm dismayed by ads in mobile games my kids play. Unskippable 30 second videos that peddle poorly made F2P games.

I manage to keep them mostly out of it by paying for worthy games and deleting the rest.

However I would in fact happily welcome _some_ ads. Ones that would simply inform me of existence of masterpieces like Tiny Bubbles or Monument Valley rather than peddle anything. This idea of a tiny ad network with curated content comes up in my head often. Sure it won't make any money it would do some good.

If we must have ads, the best quality ads I see online are dumb ads. Just an image as a link. The most effective ads I see are ones on blogs where the blogger sells ad space (side columns) and they're just images that directly link to the product. The ads are relevant to the blog and readers. 99% of other online ads I see are visual garbage and irrelevant. The "targeting" is abysmal.

Convincing all of these sites that Google, Meta, or other services, are "superior" for ads genuinely seems like incredible marketing. They've siphoned up enormous amounts of money and in return put in place a miserable user experience while making media companies wholly reliant on them.

The exact company you're asking for existed already, almost two decades ago. It was called Project Wonderful, and initially focused on independent blogs and webcomics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderful

It never managed more than modest success and never expanded far outside its initial sphere. It shut down in 2018 because it was unable to compete with all the monopolist walled garden ad spaces.

There are various small projects that could claim to be successors to that ethos -- but (to a rounding error) no one has heard of them because, contrary to your claim, the revealed "premium" that users place on "quality ads" is dwarfed by the premium that advertisers place on aggressive attention vampires (and the latter are the ones actually paying)

You might be interested in The Trade Desk and their Sellers and Publishers 500. It focuses on only quality content and quality ads. https://www.thetradedesk.com/resources/what-is-sellers-publi...

I think at the beginning Google was the good one keeping display ads high quality, so that even some ad blocking lists didn't remove them straight away. But yeah, today it is impossible to browse some sites or use apps without being tricked into endless maze of close button. And when I see Temu ads I throw up.

I think the deed is done. We are never going back to "good" ads anymore. The market's greatest revenue makers are those who are dumb ad clickers. We need more intrusive ads to get them on board now. The smart ones can still use adblock.

I'd use the web more without an adblocker if this were the case.