Ad blocking proliferates, yet Google continues to make more ad revenue than they did the year before. How does that happen? It happens by improving margins by

Ad blocking proliferates, yet Google continues to make more ad revenue than they did the year before. How does that happen? It happens by improving margins by paying site owners less per ad than they did before. This resulted in mass-produced blogspam that site owners could jam more ads into to make up the loss in revenue. Google rewards these types of pages by upranking them in their search algorithm, then extinguishing them by summarizing the content in the search result ("zero-click searches"), thereby paying site owners nothing while profiting off the ads in the search result page. This would have happened regardless of ad blocking, where they were already paying nothing to site owners due to zero impressions and clicks. Google is a publicly traded company, so the line needs to go up every quarter by any means necessary.