content: It's not so much hard to understand as it is that making ads less obnoxious reduces their effectiveness.  The whole point of an ad is to attract your attention as quickly as possible before you get distracted by the content and to remain in your memory after you are done consuming the content.  That's really hard to do while simultaneously being subtle and unobtrusive. There's definitely some disconnect between consumers and advertisers, but not all of them are clueless.  They know what they're doing, and they're going to ride it out as long as they can because despite what seems to be a very vocal outcry, their methods are still effective for a large portion of the population, including lots of people who actively think they're beyond the influence of these aggressive marketing methods. The tide will eventually turn as more and more people simply cut off advertisers' revenue stream, but it's going to be a long fight and it might help if we were more vocal about what we want from advertising instead of just what we don't want.  We have to accept that there will always be advertising, and a lot of people (though not as many as they'd like you to believe) really do rely on it to create the content people enjoy so much.  If we ever want a system of true coexistence, we need to find ways to work together and come up with effective advertising methods that don't alienate the people they are supposed to be marketing to or miss them altogether.