[andrewla]

I think what this article is saying is more along the lines of "don't come to me with business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream", or generalized to "there are many people who will not put money into business ideas that rely on advertising as their revenue stream". [1]

While true, it's not useful -- there's lots of evidence that there are people who feel the other way. Ideas for companies that have no more of a business model than "attract eyeballs" seem to do just fine, and there are notable examples that do more than just fine (e.g. Google). The point has been made many a time that human attention is not easy to get, and there are people willing to pay money to get some fraction of that attention.

My pet peeve is when sites that do not need to carry advertising carry large amounts of very annoying advertising -- I'm looking at you, Amazon, with your "Product Ads From External Websites", which you occasionally trick me into clicking because it looks like "Customers Who Looked At This Also Looked At". Or, far worse, is eBay, which is so inundated with ads that I find it almost unusable.

[1] The exception, I guess, being companies that are in the business of serving or enhancing ads.