> Venture capital funds the content, on the hope that people watch ads in the future.

Obviously, this isn't sustainable in itself.

> Google accumulated untold riches from those primitive ads yet they and Meta have tightened the screw a little bit more in each passing year.

Google doesn't have to actually make any content, they just link to it. This is relatively cheap.

If you're actually producing content (that isn't AI slop), you don't get the benefit of that sort of scale. There's no way to automate it.