Content targeted / display ads would fix this. By design, they pay sites a premium for quality content, unlike user targeting which pays for quality eyeballs.
If user targeting were banned, we’d be back to economic incentives for content creators that are similar to pre-internet media and publishing.
In particular, you’d be paid for having a consistent measurable audience, which means the money would go to distribution channels that had high quality editors and curation. Today’s ad netwoks funnel that money to clickbait farms.
Only partly cuz Content is easy to copy and duplicate and rebroadcast. All of which the platforms have made free and easy. That has to be addressed.
Cuz One journo surfaces info. 6000 journos copy it and broadcast it and all expect to paid.
The solutions have to built around content reduction cuz right now we are over loaded with millions of people creating nothing new and expecting to be rewarded.
There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech!
New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a fraction of their billions each to finance whatever seems remotely reasonable while squinting in that space, just for a chance to hit the jackpot and get more billions, maybe even a trillion, and their face onto Forbes and on TV.
The poor suckers gotta scramble. They invent all kinds of bullshit, and they sell it to the other poor suckers who advise the rich guys. Teams of specialists are created. Whole organizations. There's HR, somebody to organize team building events. Every layer spawns another layer. Lawyers, somebody to give sexual harassment trainings, someone to run the cafeteria.
Buildings are rented from the rich guys via managment companies run by the poor suckers. Every day a handful of people make it and can even buy a house! Codes of conduct are written, company values and mission statements. People pivot, jump from place to place, try to sign the best contract. Every once in a while an exec jumps ship with several hundred mil in the bank.
It's a great life. What could be better?
The US and its mindless dynamics definately could use a kick in the teeth to speed up the change. But its happening with interest rates rising, dedollarization etc. Some rich folk who think nothing is changing and their behavior doesnt need to change, their story wont end well.
They dont have as much control over anything as they think. In fact I think rich people are going to take the biggest hit mentally, financially, socially cause its very precarious having wealth without control over what happens tomorrow morning.