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That's not always true. Some ad models just care that a user may have seen an ad. A lot of sites you can't just "pay them money."

Some ad companies pay per view

Yeah but CPM (cost per impression metric) is not a scalable business model alone -- CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition) metrics have arisen because sites will spam impressions to people in Malaysia who will never buy anything...cheap impressions don't power a site for very long unfortunately.

Many sites in the news media are still primarily on impression-based ad revenue. Often, a print advertising purchase comes with a certain number of impressions on the website.

Where did mst say that they didn't plan on clicking on any ads?

I'd imagine that most of the time people would only consider clicking on ads they found "not annoying" in the first place.

Impression-based costing isn't unheard-of, even today.