Yeah, and it was also a dog whistle to conservatives to feel under represented and “oppressed” by the presence of a non white person as a superhero.
The people you’re talking about can easily clarify it by saying “I don’t like it, but I’m happy to see more women and people of color in these roles”. Bish bash bosh, not a racist.
The people who don’t care and don’t have an adblocker aren’t and weren’t ever the target. The people who are being targeted have an adblocker, and they’re all moving to FireFox.
What Google is getting out of this most of all is future compliance as new users coming to Chrome will never know a world in which ad blockers were freely available on Chrome, as well as dog whistling this to other corporate browser vendors.
There were less than 200 websites in 1993 when the first paid ad was introduced shortly thereafter. There were over 100k websites by the end of 1995.
So you’re kind of right, but ads have been part of the Internet for 30 years. And half of the internet that we know today wouldn’t have survived if this wasn’t the case.