1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.
2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.
You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.
There's a couple of non-sequitors here.
1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable.
2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit.
You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.