If you put ads on page e.g. Amazon product that relates to your content with affiliate link, that's fair and acceptable and appreciated.
If you put an ad that your audience may be interested in, unrelated to your content e.g. content creator reviewing restaurants also advertises for gyms in my area. It is fair and tolerated.
If you outsource what ad gets shown to me, leaving me at mercy of brokers and exchanges who target me with ads based on my entire profile, ads not just related to content that I requested, but ads created based on what the ad broker/exchange know about me personally. Seeing ads for athletes foot remedy that I searched for last week, when I am looking at camera reviews is not acceptable and makes me feel totally ethical when I use ad-blockers. You, the content host, is basically luring me in with promise of content and pulling bait and switch by bombarding ads on me, things like splitting content into bite size pieces across 20 pages to convert single request into 20 impressions is waste of my time, I don't have to deal with it and will use ad-blockers without any guilt on such sites.
People have trained their eyes to not register the ads, e.g. mobile ads that scroll over the page. This is similar to browsing a print magazine and not registering ads at all consciously.
The advertisers declared war on people, looking at them as crop to be harvested. Well, the people have an opinion about this and I am totally fine with the battle raging on.
By "request it", you mean typing something into the search box and hitting enter? That would mean everything on the current search results is not an ad, right?
That's like saying if you didn't ask for it, food is not food. You appear to be defining the nature of a thing by your internal mental state, and that only works with a relatively small number of certain things.
What makes an ad an ad has nothing to do with potential-viewer intent. Lack of viewer intent is what makes it an _unwanted_ ad.
I happen to have a certain ad framed and on my wall at home. I spent money on the ad, and more money to frame it. Pretty sure that meets the definition of 'request'.
That definition would make sense only if there was a way to explicitly tell that you request ads or promoted content of some sort, most of the time you don't, you type a search query in Google's text box or click on a link to some web page, that's all. The extra content gets bundled and is loaded without asking.
