The main purpose of ads isn’t to sell you a specific product immediately, their real purpose is to expose you to their brand to make the brand more familiar (and therefore more trustworthy) to you.

For example, recently, I needed a new insurance. So of course I went to the websites of the 5 insurance companies that I knew from advertising and compared their offers. Then I went to a comparison portal, which again I knew from the ads. The best offer was from a brand I didn’t know so I went with the second one which was from a well known brand. I trusted the second offer more, simply because the brand felt more familiar to me.

Here’s another story: there is this big online clothing store. I always hated their ads, they were really annoying, and at that time I didn’t understand why anyone would buy clothes online. So guess where I went, 5 years later, after a disappointing offline shopping tour, in desparate need for new clothes?

No it wouldn’t. Corpos would just put in more effort to hide the damage. Climate change can’t be stopped by individual consumers because they have no means to verify whether a product they want to buy hurts the environment.

That’s not the usual evil corp BS they pull.

Yes it is. Why do you think they force you to pay for YT Music when all you want is an ad free experience? I tell you why: people will come to the realization that it is stupid to pay for two music streaming services at the same time, so they will cancel their Spotify subscription. This will make it extremely hard for other services to stay competitive. It's no longer enough that their app is perhaps slightly better, or that they have the better algorithm, no one will be willing to pay the extra 11 € per month for just that. So eventually, these competing music streaming services will die (maybe with the exception of Apple Music and Amazon Music). Once YouTube has the monopoly on the music streaming market, they can raise the prices again. They are using one monopoly to build a second one. And a third one. And so on, until everything is owned by Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft and no one is able to compete with anything anymore. And the worst part is, that Google doesn't even deserve any of YouTube's success. YouTube's success comes from its creators. All that Google ever did is to provide some servers and some bandwith, which arguably is expensive, but it's not really an achievement. They didn't even invent YouTube, they just bought it, made it big, and now abuse it to conquer more and more markets.