Wow, the giant flashing ad on the left of that article was so distracting I was unable to read the text. I eventually opened up the web inspector and just deleted the damn thing from the DOM.
Not only mandatory flashing, but also tracking.
If you want to view the content, it will ensure that you've seen the ad before it renders the content.
Then can and will be workarounds, but thanks to lobbying those workaround are criminal in many parts of the world.