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Given the source (The Economist) I'm expecting trash, but I'll still comment it.

TL;DR: advertisers collectively dug their own grave, do not pity them.

As the rich pay to banish commercials, advertisers hunt for their attention elsewhere

Correction: "as water is wet, advertisers hunt for the attention of everyone everywhere".

You don't need people paying to avoid ("banish"? Come on TE, don't be disingenuous) ads, to get advertisers circling them harder and harder over time, like vultures circling putrid flesh.

They'll still do it no matter what you do, because ads compete for your attention so every ad that you see makes all other ads less valuable; as such, each advertiser is encouraged to make its own ads a bit more obnoxious and frequent, to get a competitive edge.

And by doing so they degrade a common resource shared by them - your willingness to put up with their obnoxiousness. Eventually you say "screw this shit, uBlock Origin here I go". Or go with a subscription model, like the aforementioned rich people do.

As the internet has eroded the value of their ads, newspapers and magazines have made a decade-long pivot to other sources of revenue.

Newspapers and magazines were among the first businesses do litter their own webpages with more and more ads.

As such, "the internet" did not erode the value of their ads. They did it themselves.

Social media seemed like a safer space for ads. For years Facebook promised it was “free and always will be”. Two things have changed that. One is regulation.

Regulations don't change much in the big picture. The reason why non-personalised ads are worth nothing nowadays is because they're outcompeted by data-invasive ones. Remove the later from the picture, and the former becomes more attractive again. (And yes, you got to do it through regulation and legislation. It's the only way out of Tragedy of the Commons.)

Tech firms are also watching Brazil, Indonesia and Australia (where Snapchat is testing its ad-free option).

Odds are that ad-free subscriptions will fail hard here in Brazil, and likely the rest of LatAm. There's a strong "if you can get it for free, do it" culture here, and people tend to underestimate the worth of their own attention. They're a ripe market for suckers who see ads.

Since 2021 Apple has let customers opt out of being tracked by apps, crippling the ability to personalise ads and triggering a rush to alternative methods of monetisation.

Emphasis mine. That's why I said that I expected "trash" from TE: it's fine to be biased, as long as you're explicit with it. That is not what TE is doing - through the text it's using carefully picked words to cast privacy measures in a negative light, but never outright saying "privacy bad mkay, think on the advertisers".

Or alternatively you skip all that crap with personalised ads, advertisers and the likes, and hop into a non-profit social network. That is a truly ad-free internet.