Ads are fast. Ad networks however are slow. Bad tech with old vendors is most of the problem. Our ads load faster than the content half the time. Sites like Washington Post, The Guardian, Ars Technica show how you can have a fast site with ads. Very solvable through technology.
Ads are definitely more anonymous than payments. Payments = credit cards or bank accounts. Guess what that means? Your name, address, age, credit history, employment, etc all perfectly accessible and tied to your identity. Profiling is used to give you more relevant ads. Someone who doesn't have children doesn't need to see diaper ads so it's a perfectly reasonable thing. I agree that sometimes it's taken too far with retargeting where you see the same ads constantly but this is a different matter. Our network focuses mostly on context of the page (tech site = tech ads) and performs just as well without any tracking (other than history of ads seen to avoid showing same ads).
The internet is a vector for malware. There absolutely is a way to vet content, but standards and enforcement is just not there right now. Ad networks dont really suffer anything when bad stuff happens so they have no incentive to do much about it. We don't even accept any 3rd party content on our network so we're far more secure than even the sites we run on.
Again, all of this is down to implementation - nothing wrong with the ad model itself.
