The ads you see tell you a lot about the effectiveness of the ads. Or at least they tell you about how effective ad-buyers perceive the ads to be.
If ad buyers thought that YouTube ads actually worked, you would see big time companies buying YouTube ads. You would also see fewer ads selling at higher prices.
The fact that YouTube ads are so garbage is an indicator that their perceived effectiveness is terrible. Therefore the ads have to be sold for low prices. And low priced ads bring in all sorts of low budget scams who couldn’t afford to buy better placements.
Also, a lot of these ads, despite being obvious scams, are not actually illegal in a lot of places. If the law doesn’t force a company like Google to turn away dollars, they aren’t going to turn them away.
Also, I think this difference in ads at least partially explains some of the different attitudes of younger generations. For example, young people do not seem to be as in love with cars as older generations. The anti-car pro-environment movement is getting strong. You have to think that young people watching YouTube instead of broadcast TV, and not being inundated with car ads, has something to do with that.
There’s a lot more going on here beneath the surface.