I've been thinking about this for .... 15 years(?) now...
Yes, there's been mass advertising ever since the first mass-printed newspapers and magazines. There's been radio ads, and TV ads since the beginning of radio and TV.
But until ... What? Web 2.0, or whatever, we've been free to skip them. On commercial broadcast TV, when the ad break came on, that was your cue to walk away and go get a drink or a snack from the kitchen. That was actually expected (that's why the volume on commercials was generally higher than the actual shows, so you could hear them from the other room).
And companies still made money from advertising. Even when the ads did not follow you, personally. No ad man from the 1970s was "scraping your data," and stalking you, because the technology that allows that didn't exist, yet. Just putting the brand name out in the public zeitgeist was enough, so that when you were in the store, and ready to buy something, you'd be more likely to buy the brand you'd heard of before.
But now that the technology does exist, skipping ads, and blocking ads, is treated like a moral failing. Like, you're not even allowed to get up and go to the kitchen, anymore, or change the channel when the ads come on (I used to be able to watch 2 or 3 shows at the same time by doing that, 30-ish years ago).
And there are more ads than there ever were, 50 years ago.
...The law of diminishing returns. The more ads there are, the more they just become noise, the less return the corporations get from their advertising budgets, the more the corporations want to make sure they're spending their money on something worthwhile, the more they're going to code for unskippable ads, and pop up ads, the more ads make for a negative feeling... rinse and repeat.
Just let us walk away.
