[Retric]

You misunderstand, if you penalize excessive advertising then the revenue generated per page view decreases. This will reduce but not eliminate the amount of effort spent on these projects resulting in fewer such webpages.

So ‘How to unclog a toilet’ is always going to get SEO optimized spam. However, most topics don’t get that many views making them less viable for this business model.

[brookst]

> the revenue generated per page view decreases

That assumption is worth reconsidering. It may be that fewer ads would just be more expensive to run and would work out similarly revenue-wise in the long run. The value of lots of ads may be diversification and smoothing out revenue, not increasing net.

[Retric]

If every single website on the planet had fewer ads then the new equilibrium might be roughly equivalent revenue, but many websites only have a single banner advertisement. So much of the redistribution of revenue would end up on those websites.