There's that old saw about being incapable of understanding when one's salary depends on the misunderstanding, and it applies here. Our profession has helped make advertisements markedly worse (which is to say, better, by data-mining the hell out of individuals and aggregates alike and sharpening the psychological tools of attack to points) and markedly more aggressive, but fuck it, let's go shopping. I guess.

Did you read the last paragraph in my post? I explicitly addressed that. My point is:

1. Ad arbitrage has a role.

2. The blame of annoying/bad UX is unfairly being deferred to arbitragers. It's usually the implementation that annoys users, and that's generally the publisher's fault.

I don't know anything about System1's ethics and I'm not trying defend them by any means, but I don't agree with an argument that X company is bad because they've participated in arbitrage.

I think it is entirely fair to blame arbitragers. They are the only ones who can control the advertisement implementation (as website owners no longer have direct relationships with ad providers), and they clearly fail to do so.