Well, I think either way, Internet ads are dead for the most part. They have been dead for many years now. They started exactly the same way and went through the same flow. There were all kinds of ads: ads to install junk, ads that were totally misleading, ads that were very sexual in nature just to tempt users into clicking them, and ads that were totally irrelevant to the topic of the website or the user's interests.

But then it got so bad that people started using ad blockers long ago, and they got rid of this mess. Later, companies slowly started moving away from Internet advertising in general, and when the mobile and smartphone market started to take off, all the money flowed into that world instead. If you look at the way ads work in the mobile industry, even today, they are full of junk and incentivize users to install apps and perform specific actions. There is an equal amount of junk and misleading content in mobile ads today, like there used to be in Internet ads more than a decade ago. But right now, we are at that point. Mobile ads will also start getting muted one way or the other, and there will be huge incentive and opportunity sitting on top of that right there.

To add to this specific article, though, I would say it would have hardly made a difference anyway for the author in 2025.

ads definitely aren't dead. Though ads on random networks like adsense probably are because the quality of traffic is horrendous. Basically every beginner adwords guide will have you disable network traffic(turn off adsense).

Advertising direct on sites is still very valuable.

Large news sites still depend on ads. They don't make much, but there's not much else they can do to increase revenue.