The author's complaint(s) stem from the ads that "just keeps downloading" which in approximately five minutes downloaded "almost half a gigabyte" worth of information.

This is a prime example of why many people use adblockers, it's not just to make the majority of the web actually usable, but it prevents excessive data transfers that we never asked for. For what it's worth, the same article is just a hair over 8MB when ads are blocked and a hair over 9MB when you scroll down (loading the thumbnails for the other articles).