I believe this quote explains the situation well; "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
It now appears it was a delay tactic. 2-3 ads on the side, next to 10-20 "organic" search results, like Google in 2005, was great and nice. And it's certainly true that occasionally the ads were useful. The ads, like the search results, were high quality.
Now Google barely has one organic search result visible. I just checked for the search "credit card", which I know is bad, but ... The first organic search result is the fifth, with only 2 results actually visible when you do the search, both "sponsored". 3 and 4, not on the first page, are sponsored too. And if you don't want commercial search results for that search (excluding wikipedia that seems to get very special treatment) the first organic result, the first result not trying to get you to put yourself into debt ... well, I gave up after scrolling though at least 20 pages. It just isn't there anymore.
Hell, it isn't even that long ago that in-line ads were on the first page of Google ... now they take up 80% of the space on every page of Google results. So organic results have been banned from the 2nd page to at least the 21st page or so. There's no more point to "Googling".
Google now really does look like Yahoo looked in 2000. And last year they did layoffs, just like yahoo. What I don't understand is how investors fool themselves into believing the stock price won't do the exact same thing. 5-10 more years and Google gets sold to Verizon for 10 billion. And why? Because no manager at Google will risk their career on getting 1% less out of their customers than they did last quarter ... and they do that like everyone else: by accepting every last dollar every last scummy advertiser makes to Google.
News content really doesn't benefit, though. Just clickbait stuff.
I guess for something a bit more catch-all like "Rolling Stone" Ads would detract.
But for something like USA Hockey, honestly the Ads are more interesting than half the actual content. Although seeing the same 4 ads for home skating rinks has gotten old.
Although I guess this would be more akin to searching Google for "new hockey products" and then it would make a lot of sense to return pure ads.
I'll bite…because they're pretty? Or because how else would one stay on top of the latest Axe body spray releases?
This is more acute on hard news. Where a single page article may cost 100k to produce, yet wont be able to be monetized per its "cost to produce".
So yes, it would be a disappointment to lose "great content". now, here lies in the kicker. You get to decide great content with your patronage ( or lack there of)
"But what about things you didn't know you wanted?" I can't want something I don't know about. I can want something I can imagine, in which case I might go searching to see if someone else has made it reality. But I don't need others trying to artificially inflate my demand for goods and services.
But ‘Computer Shopper’ magazine on the other hand was half magazine, half catalog. The ads are the point.