Why do I get the impression that I'm paying protection money to the mob?

These ads wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for Google.

Um, the internet was full of ads before Google.

The main way Google changed things was AdSense, which for a while at least replaced horrible "punch the monkey" type ads with text ads.

Unfortunately text ads don't seem to be so popular these days.

Correspondingly, if there were no ads there would be many fewer small websites.

Absolutely true. Fewer, but better quality.

With money as a motivator, we have ended up with a lot of keyword-spammy poor quality content.

Why better quality?

A whole lot of the sites I spend most time with are ad supported. It's not clear to me why less money == more quality, in your eyes.

I dont know if i agree (im on the fence), but he did mebtiob spammy click bait titles.

There would be a hell of ablot less of those if there were no ad revenue(as ads are loaded when you enter they authors dobt care if you read those spammy articles, just load the damn page).

I would like to velieve this is true, but im not sure it would be(in the case of getting well written articles without ads).

Google and many websites wouldn't exist in the first place if it wasn't for ads.

What about paying to not see ads in search results? Website ads are a little different than search ads.