[mrweasel]

For some products it's obviously a fine system. A majority of people will never pay for a search engine, or social media, so ads are a good way to pay for those services.

Where I think companies, such as Google or Meta, goes off the deep end, is the amount of money you can realistically extract from advertising, without compromising your product. Both Google and Meta (much to my surprise) are extremely wealthy, but at the cost of what I'd call decency or morale. Both could have fine products and successful business, but somewhat smaller, and be financed by ads.

If you look back that the original Google ads, where they not successful? They certainly seemed to pay the bills back them. My point is: If your company is financed by advertising, you need to accept that there's a limit to your potential growth, if you still want to be view in an overall positive light.

[mrkramer]

Yes, there is a limit on how many ads they can show to you without deteriorating user experience but sometimes they just don't care. They think like this: Q2 results were weaker than expected, let's show more ads to users in order to boost our Q3 results.