On desktop I got one "thanks for reading" one halfway through and that's after ublock blocked 26 things. Their mobile site might not have the same design.
I didn't get anything on desktop, but I've got a bunch of privacy lists and Fanboy's Annoyances turned on.
Only thing I got on Chrome Tablet/Android was this super nasty TRUSTe cookie layer.
2 popups make the article unreadable for you? I got one popup and some tracking links blocked by ad blocker, nothing unusual.
I got (with uBlock and uMatrix) one popup to sign up for their newsletter or something and decided their site probably wasn't interesting enough to read anyway.
Got two popups on mobile, second one was "subscribe to our newsletter". I didn't even start reading at that point. didn't know that site before, but they immediately made it to my personal list of unprofessional wannabe news websites to avoid.