EFF's Privacy Badger, NoScript, Unlock, AdblockPlus has many lists, and many many more add-ons can show you all the nasties in each page, and you click-block them once and for all. Same add-ons are also for the Firefox on Android.

Edit: yes most likely the author is someone that may be seldonmly writing for the site, or just sells his texts and doesn't really pay attention/care where this is posted.

OP here. Please note that the author is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News, as cited here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/author/katienotopoulos.

That just makes it worse imho.

Yes I use many of those. I whitelist every domain allowed to execute JavaScript on my machine, and for the most part I get a better browsing experience for it.

So with regards to BuzzFeed I'm very aware of what garbage their site is. Right now on BuzzFeedNews I see 9 third party domains running ads or tracking pixels via JavaScript.

Ironically, one of those 9 is Facebook. So Facebook is tracking the people reading this article about how Facebook is tracking them.

But most people aren't technologically savvy enough or can't be bothered to run tools like these, and just browse the internet with basically no understanding of what is happening as they do.

I know & use three of those four addons, what's Unlock?

apologies for that, my autocorrect kicked in. I wrote uBlock and my phone did its own thing, and I missed it when I read it again prior to hitting 'reply'. It's called 'Muphry's Law' [1] and I fell right in it!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law

NoScript shows buzzfeed.com when you initially load it, when you (temporarily) accept that domain you get lots of others... including facebook.net. Allowing any one of those (which I didn't do) may bring up others in this very fun game of javascript domain whackamole. Using that extension or one of many others that work similarly will enlighten even the most technophobic of journalists as to how this all works.

I find it hard to believe they looked into the subject and didn't run across these. But I suppose it's possible.

If as a reporter investigating online advertising, you don't know what's going on in your own backyard, there's clearly something very wrong going on.

If that's the case, the author shouldn't be writing articles about online advertising.

why? what bearing does that have on any factual information being communicated?

Expertise and experience in the field and with analytic tools.