> “Advertisers want to be part of a good experience. They don’t want to be interruptive,” he told me.

I simply don't believe this. Advertisers clearly want to be as interruptive as people will put up with.

> “trying to figure out what’s going to be helpful for the user experience.”

Having no ads is helpful for the user experience. Anything else is detrimental to the user experience. What advertisers try to do, and have always tried to do, is to find where the line of "intolerable experience" begins and to stay just on this side of it.