Believe it or not, some people make high-quality content on the internet with the expectation of compensation.

The current state of advertising is ethically and technically questionable in many ways. But the idea of advertising as a revenue model is not.

Ethical advertising is pretty much a unicorn. I don't deny that it's possible but I would struggle to find even a single example of it in the wild.

I guess Deck Network was an example of that. Most of the 5-6 ads I intentionally clicked ever was theirs. There were also similar networks like Carbon.