> The problem with greed is that it only takes a handful of players to ruin it for everyone.

This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons. Bad actors in the advertising space rush to extract the most value out of internet ads by continually pushing the frontier of obnoxiousness. Because, 'hey if I don't do it, someone else will'. And much like the tragedy of the commons with overfishing, they have to keep increasing effort to make up for the decline in effectiveness as they 'overfish' internet users.

Even if you're an ethical advertiser you end up getting harmed by the unethical ones as wide swathes of people start using ad blockers, and the ones that don't are ad-blind anyway.

I've been sticking to blocking all ads everywhere for a long time. It feels like every time I start thinking I ought to whitelist a few of the sites with better content, a story comes out about a fresh set of malware via ads attacks on very respectable sites. Another example of advertiser's greed and sloppiness spoiling the pot.

There's an interesting short story I am unable to find online at the moment, which describes a near-future in which people have figured out how to have similarly invasive effects on the viewers with print ads - leading to infectious graffiti, for example.