Quick, before reading the article, what do you think they found?
Not saying their study was biased, just that the joke plays to an assumption we all make.
This page had social share buttons on the side, intercom(?) looking button, and a popup to give them my email all orchestrated to fade-in/pop-in before I had a chance to really dig into the article. And now I wont.
For those sites that are broken without javascript, and which I absolutely must use, I use Firefox with the NoScript and Request Policy extensions (though I'm migrating to Pale Moon because Pentadactyl is going to break on newer versions of Firefox) and Privoxy for ad blocking. For the few sites that don't work with Firefox, I use Opera, again with Privoxy for ad blocking.
As a result, 99% of the time, the only ads I ever see are text-based, and only when embedded directly in the page I'm reading.