I want to say this is stupid and wrong, but unfortunately I’m not sure it is. And in fairness it works out great for me; since I routinely use adblockers I’m being subsidized by the people who do look at ads.
Ads are annoying, except as compared to the alternative. And this is true at many levels. Not only do ads elegantly solve some pricing problems, they actually create a continuous economic incentive to hunt down spammers and even to care about the quality rather than quantity of time spent.