Ads and poor web page design

Complaint about the busyness and general ugliness of many web sites seems to be in the air. Roger Black writes a part 1 and part 2 blames the structure of advertising on the Web. Content providers are forced to seek advertisers since users are not paying for content. This feeds the tendency to oversell ad space bringing about sites: "Most content sites look so bad they actually repel readers rather than attract them." Black suggests that content providers "greatly reduce the number of ad positions" and "charge more for ads" along with some other design solutions. (via GigaOM) Would that it were so! In the meantime there are apps/browser add-ons like Readability and Clearly for Evernote.