Is it really this, or is it that advertisers don't want their brand associated with negativity in general?
How they're doing it is interesting, but I think the analysis is weird.
In this case, it wasn't an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable in general, the problematic ads were those shown based on keywords of the story. E.G. an advertisement about how safe car X is in a story about an fatal car accident.
E.g. you are an airline and you want to advertise your flights. You might want to have your ad appear on pages that have contexts of "travel, flying, vacations" etc since you believe that those pages are likely good pages to reach people interested in your services. Sounds reasonable. An advertiser would obviously NOT want to appear advertising their cheap flights to Tenerife next to this sort of terrible, tragic news.
As others have mentioned its perceived as bad for the brand be be seen next to bad news, but more importantly (and more likely IMHO) people are human and understand the gravity of the situation so apply common sense and tact.
So it gets into a silly situation where you have advertisers targeting contexts "travel, flying, vacations AND NOT disaster, crash" - whilst you are there you may as well start excluding some other negative things too, like "thailand, children, ladyboy" etc etc until you have these huge lists of tens of thousands of exclusions getting into the ridiculous depths of human depravity, whilst you just want to show on "good" pages about just 3 simple contexts: travel, flights or vacations.
And even then ads sometimes still slip through and appear on "bad" pages because someone forgot to put "erotic trepanation" or whatever in the exclusion list.
With more and more of this style of content being used, it is in my opinion important to better inform the not so tech savvy public, that computer generated relations can be really useful but will yield some results that are wrong or might seem distasteful for the human mind.
The problem must be that the highest traffic stories are typically the most sensitive ones.
In contrast to the directly sold banners, where the marketing team might just postpone a whole scheduled campaign for an airline when half the front page is filled with stories about a plane crash.
Still I think it's impossible to avoid some inappropriate ads at time and one has to live with it.
IMO advertisers understand that contents making people angry (like politics, mostly) or sad will drive most of the page views, and are OK with some level of negativity. Tragedies directly affecting their potential customers is just a bridge too far.
For comparison, discussion on afghanistan and air strikes is OK: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world/asia/ashraf-ghani-of...
> Advertisers know this too, and the New York Times might stipulate in contracts they’ll try to keep ads off sensitive pages.