I don't understand why providing a relevant set of ads in the shortest possible time is unrelated to encouraging people to click on ads. It seems clearly to be quite closely related to me -- provide a better ad experience, and people are more likely to make use of the ads. Whether the engineers optimising the system realise this or not is somewhat irrelevant.
Ok, I agree that providing a better ad experience makes it more likely that people will use those ads. Would you agree that that might be expressed by saying, "If the probability of someone clicking on an advertisement is X then increasing the number of people who see/visit the page proportionally increases ad clicks by factor X ?"
If you agree that this restatement adequately captures your claim then I'd like you to consider the difference between "creating a desirable web site", versus "getting someone to click on an ad."
Using examples, someone who designs an advertisement to 'appear' underneath my mouse as my mouse traverses a trigger point is "trying to get me to click", whereas someone who designs a web page on widgets which includes an advertisement for something associated with widgets off to the side, they are not working on 'trying to get me to click.'
My claim is that engineers at Google (and presumably Facebook and Twitter) are working on making your experience with their products the best it can be. This increases the number of people who use their products, and if the probability of someone clicking an advertisement is fixed, the higher traffic rates will result in more clicks. And yet, unlike the original author's posting, they worked not on 'getting people to click' rather they were working on 'being more useful to more people.'
Its important to remember that advertisements are not 'evil', not even a little bit evil. I used to subscribe to BYTE magazine and Computer Shopper in part to get access to the advertisements. These represented companies who had things I would likely want to purchase and knowing about them was a service, not a burden. The consumer 'cost' of advertising relates to how much the consumer cares that its 'part of what they are looking for' or not.
Abusive use of advertising decreases your readership which reduces the rate your desirability as an advertising platform. Its a negative value coefficient in the feedback loop so it self corrects.
