Websites: Then vs Now

A crummy history of ads on the internet:

Starts out mostly used in formal fields and universities. Very usable!

Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation, leading to scammers and popup hell duw to misuse of a feature.

Ad blockers start to reign in that shit, and the better browsers kill the popup infestation at the source. Pretty darn usable at this point, except for internet explorer.

Google, an ad company, decides to make a browser so they can do all the malicious advertising and tracking on the backend.

uBlock Origin is too effective at blocking the browser based tracking and advertising so google decided to do the manifest 3 or whatever that bullshit is called to openly force ads onto users.

Based on history, I expect chrome to die a slow death due to the backlash from the manifest crap, but could be wrong since people are apparently fine with ads being forced into streaming services.

Businesses get on board and start the horrible ad infestation
There were a couple years where businesses were "entering cyberspace" and still trying to figure it out. Mostly this involved static webpages, since they saw the web as a kind of yellow pages. i.e. a business' web page was their ad.
people are apparently fine with ads
It amazes me how accepting most people are of ads. I suspect Google's going to win, and their ultimate contribution to humanity will be forcing ads into everything.
- Why google became the dominate search engine in the first place was because every other search engine was an ad infested nightmare fuel.
  There is a limit of shit that people will put up with. Google is pushing that limit hard right now. Which is why I no longer use it.
  
  Partially. Not really. Page Rank instantly obsoleted every other search algorithm in existence. Nobody was able to get high quality results right at the top so consistently. The ad-free part was a bonus, at least for a while.
- It amazes me how accepting most people are of ads. I suspect Google’s going to win, and their ultimate contribution to humanity will be forcing ads into everything.
  People just eat up 'personalized' things so whoever coined 'personalized ads' was an evil genius.
- People are accepting of ads because ads are literally everywhere. A world without ads would be very strange indeed!
  Every logo that exists and every product that has its own name/brand printed on it is an ad. Every product name in a catalog or simple list is an ad.
  A world without ads would be like hundreds of years ago when you could buy soap that just looked like soap with no labels and no packaging at all. When the only food you purchased was bare produce/meat (or the whole animal). But even then any assembled/manufactured product would have some sort of "maker's mark".
  I mean, how long have humans been branding cattle? That's the original use of that term!
  
  That's an excellent point. Hundreds of years ago, if you wanted to recomment the product of a particularly skilled soapmaker or farmer, you'd say "Jo made that", and maybe you could point to Jo's logo on the product so your friends knew how to recognize it. So the signifier of quality (the brand) pointed to the signified of a quality product. But now the signifier has become disentangled from the signified: the advertisements and marketing campaigns promote brand loyalty even if the product becomes worse through inferior ingredients or shrinkflation. Because of this, the signifier is presented to us when we do not want to see it.
  
  A logo's very different from what I would consider an "ad". I don't mind logos existing, but anything pushed in my face is horrible and I hate it.
I think the difference is that there is not really a Netflix-without-the-ads alternative for the same price. And if you are willing to pay a bit more, well, you can just pay for the higher tier of Netflix without ads.
With browsers on the other hand, it's all free with virtually no barrier to switching. So I think people will defect away a lot more quickly when a browser starts to worsen in quality (especially since Chrome doesn't have Daddy Microsoft to force users to use it by default)

pop-up ads? Ha... try pop-UNDER ads.

also can't have ads when there is no javascript to begin with. Just static content.

hah, forgot img tags?
- still static content.
  
  they're advertisements!
  
  also you think content is static just because it has no js? hyperlinks! forms! the server!!!
  
  Hyperlinks and Forms are static, yet they allow for interactivity (communication with the server and or url handler like mailto:, tel:, fax: etc.)
  iframes, frames (and framesets) were a fricking mistake. And that malicious practice with meta refresh yeah, that certainly was a thing back then. I loved when internet explorer just clicked on every navigation...
  img tags, are not advertisements, or what do you mean? since you probably don't mean <img/>
  also, you can edit your commit so that you don't have to spam comments.
  
  different point -> different comment?
  also ads technically are anything that promotes a product? i'm not using the definition of "visible malware added to a website"
  
  consider this. an iframe containing a page with meta refresh, and on each load, the server adds a different hyperlinked image. and some cookies.

Not to mention the internet wasn't as secure as it is now. There was lots of malicious code everywhere. Oh, and if you write a typo in any website's name there was a 50/50 chance you'll be redirected to porn.

There's vastly more malicious code now than there was back then. Every company that has an online presence is constantly under attack. Constantly. There isn't an IPv4 address that exists that isn't scanned and have an attempt at hacking performed within seconds of being connected.
Not only that but today's malicious code is much better at what it does with hundreds of amazing features and methods of branching out using different attack methods. Today's malware is so good it updates itself very carefully/as secretly as possible so that some old compromised machine that no one thinks about anymore can become the next vector of attack inside your network.
All it takes is one active vulnerability
Keep all your shit up to date, people! When was the last time you checked your router to see if it had updates? Hmm‽
It was such a time saver...
Imagine my surprise when Spider-Man.com lead to marvels website but Xmen.com lead to porn

I think this entire response thread is too young. Back when you connected to the Internet with 14.4k and 28k modems (mid to late 90's), websites were as OP described. Simply put, there was no bandwidth for too much extra crap.

I started using Internet in 2004 (as a school kid) so i didn't actually experience modem Internet era, but still i miss it (i'm kind of nostalgia guy as well)
Especially in Poland, where for a long time there was only dial-up Internet connection with 3-minute impulse (where each one was kinda expensive at the time), so you wanted to open as many websites in this timeframe that interested you then disconnect

Came here to say this. They make a joke about how many adds are on the Internet in an episode of Futurama that aired in 2000.

I remember using internet in mid to late 90s and there were no ads, maybe OP means that period?

I remember hunting for the actual "Download" button. Got pretty good at it I would say.