The optimist in me thinks that if all the free users currently using ad blockers switched to paid users or free users that aren't using ad blockers, the amount of ads that actually get shown could be lessened... And in an ideal world that's what would happen. The pessimist in me says Google's current management is going to keep the ads where they are though.

There may be a market force in play here too though where they went "can we add more ads?" and they saw that if they added any more than they currently have, people just stop using the service. If that's the case/what they're bumping into (or what they start to bump into), there could genuinely be a drop in the number of ads after this rolls out.

Services are funded by advertisers. Advertisers are funded by their customers, the general public, after charging more for their products to fund advertisement. This is a symptom of the commodification of the collective consciousness. Absolutely disgusting.