I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced I'll ever get big enough for that to be a problem. Even if I'm 5 times bigger than every current competitor to Google combined, I've only got few percent of the market share.
But sure, even if that would happen, I have an ace up my sleeve. An devastating and incredibly simple way of limiting spam, which is to go for the wallet and de-rank sites for having ads.
Google could and would never do that, of course, because they are selling the same ads. It would undermine their entire business model. This conflict of interest is the core of Google's search engine spam problems.
It seems that you're talking about de-ranking the fat middle of the curve which serves the banal content consumed by those in the fat middle themselves, leaving only the tail end, theoretically serving the corresponding tail end of content consumers, which might approximate the early days of the internet before the normies invaded, before the barrier to entry was lowered such that it approached zero.
Google would get sued if they did that. Google are already sued a lot for their search ranking behavior, everything they do they have to be able to defend in court.
In general, it's a lot smaller problem. With the current SEO spam, the goal is to get a visit, not necessarily actual engagement. To get something out of amazon affiliate links or similar, you actually need to convince someone to click the link and go to amazon and buy something. That's a quite different beast.
But sure, even if that would happen, I have an ace up my sleeve. An devastating and incredibly simple way of limiting spam, which is to go for the wallet and de-rank sites for having ads.
Google could and would never do that, of course, because they are selling the same ads. It would undermine their entire business model. This conflict of interest is the core of Google's search engine spam problems.