Online Ads Not Malware???
Much evilness is in the URL-rewriting (hover shows ultimate destination until you right-click and it is rewritten and you can see the ad/redirector/logging service URL, you never see the original URL again unless you click and it's 50-50 if you actually go there) which seems to happen on legitimate sites but as per the article is actually just an ad frame sold to someone who rented it out to someone else who did a short-term lease deal with that supplier of useless clickbait crap for bored people.
It's partly a browser problem though - third party scripts are always going to be dependent on an entirely undependable chain of trust all the way down to whoever (re)wrote it.
On the other hand, if ads help pay for the running costs of a site we can either put up with them or we can give the banks a transaction fee (at whichever end, to pay or receive) for every single website we end up subscribing to.
The web ad industry just needs to stop blaming everyone else. Why blame anyone? Just get on with it.