[Wowfunhappy]

> Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future.

Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.

> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.

If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.

[hogwasher]

Google also takes the lion's share of the ad revenue. They're the reason youtube creators resort to sponsorships instead of relying on youtube's inbuilt ads. They even put ads on the videos of new youtube accounts and profit off them while telling said new accounts that they can't get any of that revenue for their own work until they hit Google's arbitrary threshold of subscribers/views. And they've been abusing the hell out of their chokehold monopoly on ads, via adsense, at every level of the system.

Point being, the fact that google ads currently don't yield much revenue per click/view for most people isn't necessarily just because they are ads.

Even so, corporations will never voluntarily conclude that they're making enough ad money. Line must go up, forever, because reasons.