I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.
I remembered an old maxim. Apparently, a successful copywriter was asked "How do you write a good ad?" and his answer was "Its very easy. Get the Yellow pages for this year, last year and the year before. See which ads repeat. They are repeating because they are working. Now just copy those ads for your purpose"
The point is, those shitty ads keep repeating on those websites because their ROI is positive. Google wants to help these people by providing them every imaginable and conceivable tool so they can do it better. This also answers your last question about how their business model is sustainable for the long term. It is actually really sustainable because you think Google is a search engine, and I think Google morphed long ago into an internet scale ad-ROI measurement engine which keeps improving (by violently invading privacy of course) both the measurement tools and the actual ROI itself for those who keep pouring money into these ads.