[wu-ikkyu]

That wouldn't be so much a problem if there wasn't already such an extreme level of advertising of shitty products to begin with.

It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".

What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"