To my knowledge, they didn't. There were a lot of imposter sites, which were indistinguishable, where you'd be told to download a VPN or similar. But the main .to site never opened any ads for me
It always did for me. The first time a torrent results page opens, the clicks open a new tab with ads. You had to refresh the results page to actually click through to the torrent.
they sure did! every half a dozen clicks! immediately blocked by my adblockers but i would still dig into the dev tools to try and figure it out occasionally
