[Brockenstein]

I don't enjoy ads either, but we have decades of precedent at this point where the vast majority of things and services on the Internet are free. We've come to expect it. And the arms race between users and ad revenue has been going on nearly as long.

What it comes down to is people want it all for nothing. And that shapes the world we live in. The Internet is the way it is because that's the way we want it. We as a group of consumers have proven for decades we're not willing to pay for every sort of thing.

As a result we've shown ourselves more than willing to be the product and then grumble about it. But so long as things are still free we can just imagine a utopia where everyone pays enough to or enough people pay to keep things where we want them.

However the market has already shown us who we really are, like it or not. And if you disagree, well welcome to the high minded minority or the deluded minority(probably majority).

[vijayr]

Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice?

What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.

[anonred]

It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.

[dismantlethesun]

That was voluntary and almost like charity. Subscription services would require payment.