Ads are definitely not bad for Google and its employees, because they're a money printing machine for a company that's essentially an online ad monopoly. Wheth

Ads are definitely not bad for Google and its employees, because they're a money printing machine for a company that's essentially an online ad monopoly. Whether this is good for the small business merchants is questionable, since it turns out your ex-employer was literally stealing the money those companies/individuals were earning through ads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103280. In the linked thread you can even read some testimonials from small merchants which you and many of the engineers were "helping". Ads are definitely bad for regular humans though: * they waste their computing resources and make their devices slow & use up the battery * they serve malware (Google got hit too) * they spy on them * they distract and manipulate them * etc Ironically, they're also bad for the software industry, since now customers are used to getting things for "free", so many are no longer paying for software, undermining the revenue stream of... small business merchants. With friends and helpers like these, business merchants would probably rather get punched in the face.