I recently listened to a podcast with Jason Furman and he made an interesting distinction. He distinguished between companies that grow to be very large through organic growth vs companies that grow very large through acquisitions. He used Walmart as an example of the former. They grew by being really good at logistics and having a really efficient supply chain, so they could offer lower prices and ultimately open a lot of stores. He used Google as an example of the latter. Obviously the search tech was their own but basically all of the ad tech (what they actually generate revenue with) was cobbled together through acquisitions.

Or educate users to pay for quality and make quality websites/products so we don't have to depend on advertising. This would be insanely difficult to pull off, but it is at least worth a try.

The incumbents have trained users to expect everything on the internet for free. People think they pay $75 (or whatever their internet connection costs) and that should cover everything - news, search, email...

How many people even pay for super important stuff like email? No wonder ads are everywhere, like bad smell.