Your comment doesn’t make sense. What profit motive? It drove them to shutdown and people to use ad blockers. The feedback loop is positive: behave well -> profit. Your comment discusses the inverse: behave poorly -> go to jail.
The profit motive in question is the motive to fill your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads. Have you visited your local newspaper's website, or a fandom property, lately?
Once enough people do that, the users install adblockers, which also hurts advertisers who were not filling your screen with shitty, laggy, possibly dangerous ads.