Dear ML Staff,
Hopefully, some lessons were drawn on your part in being more judicious with your advertisers. You always picked advertisers on the sketchy, super-intrusive end (and even that is probably not worth the little bit of extra ca$h compared to the traffic losses when it frightens many visitors), but when it comes to genuinely criminal malware installing advertisers, that reflects extremely poorly on the site, and it supposed status as not-a-free-for-all, where anything goes.
Beyond this malware episode, you can still purchase advertisers that depict sexually explicit, graphic content, without these being really intrusive (like ones that open little loud videos - it's obvious no one wants to see or hear those when they are trying to view an actual video for the site (even anon viewing of your website deserves minimal respect, I argue)). And, of course, as for safety, that's a whole misdemeanor-versus-felony level of serious.
And again, all for naught. For nothing. There's no way you need the little bit of extra money from the super-intrusive, forcing-one-to-manually-close-them, making-the-site-experience-unpleasant advertisers. There's just no way that pay that much more than the ones that are un-intrusive (again, in their format, not content).
So, whatever short-term profit goals are motivating you, ML Staff, to lean towards purchasing the intrusive advertisers (who, due to that character, also pose a greater risk in going beyond purposeful nuisance, to actual unsafe malware behaviour, as we have seen in the last few days when ML was effectively down for 75 percent of visitors), I am almost certain you are actually losing money from these.
You, ML Staff, will actually get __more money__ if you opt to go with the non-intrusive advertisers. Because, even though they pay you slightly less, the rise in traffic will more than offset the difference (difference in whatever little extra premium the intrusive advertisers are paying you right now so that they able to harass your visitors).
