...the dominant narrative of people who want to sell you advertising technology, yes.
A shopping website will want to do two things: Provide the customer with the most comfortable shopping experience while cutting down the cost of providing it. Advertising is a null-sum game in this case (cuts down costs by adding additional revenue, but makes user experience worse, thus leading to fewer customers), so it only makes sense if that's all you're selling.
How the internet nonetheless became "infested" with ads is obviously a mystery to me...
A shopping website will want to do two things: Provide the customer with the most comfortable shopping experience while cutting down the cost of providing it. Advertising is a null-sum game in this case (cuts down costs by adding additional revenue, but makes user experience worse, thus leading to fewer customers), so it only makes sense if that's all you're selling.
How the internet nonetheless became "infested" with ads is obviously a mystery to me...