> I don't get how companies
Then let's philosophize at length about it. I'm about to write a borderline religious text on the matter.
> who's only product is content
This is the reason why you could not understand.
The content is not the product. It's actually you personally. You are the product. Your attention, your memory, your cognitive functions, your behavior. They forcibly take those from you without your consent, without warning. Then they sell it off to the highest bidder. That is their product, their business model, the way they make money. Industrial scale violation of people's minds. Industrial scale mind rape.
Content? It's just bait designed to attract you. The content is completely irrelevant to them. Just a means to an end. Only reason there's any content at all is you wouldn't visit the website otherwise. To them content is nothing but a cost they'd very much enjoy not having to pay. A cost center that they're only too happily outsourcing to generative AI.
Even the word "content" is a problem. It's industry jargon but I view it as something of an euphemism. This so called "content" is nothing but a generic replaceable square around which the ads agglutinate like parasites. The web today is mostly garbage because of all this industrial scale "content" being produced. Nobody has anything real to say, it's just "content" they produce by the truckloads in order to attract people to sites so they can sell out their audience's minds to the corporations. There ought to be a better name for it. "Slop" comes to mind. Yeah, slop sounds good.
All this slop isn't real human creation, it's just an undesirable industrial byproduct of the modern web. People create slop in order to attract audiences so they can sell them out to the advertisers. When you see HN users complaining about how shitty the Google search results are, they're complaining about the ever increasing density of worthless slop they're running into when they search for literally anything. People are actually paying for search engines whose entire business model is filtering out the slop and presenting to their users the sites which are actually worth visiting.
Hell, this is why people come to HN to begin with. There's a refreshingly small amount of slop on this site. On HN you find real people writing real thoughts. People who work at billion dollar companies, people who created programming languages and operating systems that others use, people who thought up the algorithms you learn about in books, a disproportionate number of them come here in order to comment on things. Sometimes they tell incredible stories. Those comments are more valuable than the articles being commented on. This is what slop isn't: real human culture. Maybe the advertisers just haven't found out about HN yet. Not too long ago, there was a story here about Google bumping HN up in search results. That bit of news actually made me scared for the future.
What's more sinister though is the fact advertisers have literal censorship power over the web. You'll never see a text such as this comment posted on an ad-supported website. The fact is if it offends the advertisers it doesn't get published at all. Because if you publish it, they cut you off from your advertising money. Therefore the advertisers own the creators and control their creative processes. I've seen such cutoffs happen, it's downright pathetic. Watching good people bend down to the likes of Google because someone with money was offended at their brand being associated with something they didn't like even though they literally paid for it. I watched people scramble to unpublish, to delete, to destroy their own creations just to appease the almighty advertisers. It seriously made me sick.
> distastefully full of ads
It's made to be that way. It's carefully tuned via unethical human experimentation ("A/B testing") to make it as profitable as possible but just tolerable enough that you won't leave or do something about it. They employ talented programmers to design algorithms to automatically figure out your limits and push you right up to those limits.
Use uBlock Origin. It's essentially legitimate self-defense at this point. Self-defense for our minds.
Don't try to pay them off, that just proves you have disposable income to spend on products you don't need, driving up the value of your attention even further. You're essentially paying for the privilege of segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of their markets. At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO will come along, notice the vast piles of money being left on the table and then promptly sell out the audience so as to avoid leaving money on the table. Betrayal is virtually guaranteed.
Don't empathize with them. Just laugh when they call you entitled, when they call you a thief. Nobody in this world is more entitled than an advertiser. They think they are entitled to your attention. They think they can sell your attention to corporations. The mere fact they even think your attention is theirs to sell to begin with just invalidates anything they could possibly say in their defense. You'll watch them defend nonsense such as "intellectual property" even though they constantly violate your right to privacy by collecting vast amounts of personal information about you, information that really ought to belong to you by all reasonable standards.
Just use uBlock Origin. Delete their noise without a second thought. On sight. Don't lose a second of sleep over it. Don't feel an ounce of guilt.
Ads are nothing but noise. To be filtered.