I'm exactly the same. I will try to go directly to websites instead of clicking on adds from search results to avoid the PPC charge too.

You are not grasping the scale of the matter.

Thus, Google has an incentive to keep the ad space free of scams - it makes Google users more valuable to advertisers.

So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").

If the people making ads can be influenced by ads, why would they ever stop making them? It works for them, doesn't it?

But there's also the rumor floating around that all of these metrics are just hugely inflated, that these modern ads have in truth rates so miserable that a plain old billboard in the middle of nowhere would serve advertisers better, and that therefore the "modern WWW" is built on a foundation of lies, exagerations, and fake statistics.

Choose your poison.

Most ads are about a future purchase. They need to measure not did you buy now from this ad, but did all the ads you saw across all platforms (YouTube, Facebook, radio, tv, billboards) make enough of a difference in your buying habits when you finally buy. This is hard to measure, but it is more important. Most people are not buying now from an ad, they are buying in the future.

Sometimes ads are about an image. Even if you cannot afford some luxury good, they may want to advertise so that you recognize it on someone else and think "that is a rich person".