[dkfmn]

You forgot the largest plus: Ads pay for many useful and enjoyable services that are free for the consumer (or cheaper). Things like broadcast television, local news, most of the internet, games, concerts....

I don't disagree that there are many cons, but it's disingenuous not to include the services they power as one of the pluses.

Full disclosure: My career involves ads.

[amelius]

Agreed, I should have included that.

But I can add another minus: ads as a monetization scheme are unnecessarily restrictive, since the only way for an organization to increase their prices is to jump from an ad-based scheme to a paid scheme, and this jump is too big in many cases. Instead, if we paid for everything with money (not with data), then pricing would be more clear and there would not be any threshold in changing prices.

[dkfmn]

I'm not sure I fully understand, this would be pay walls on everything wouldn't it? If so, I agree it greatly increases pricing clarity but I'm not convinced it's an improvement necessarily.

I'd also mention that many freemium businesses actually introduce paid models to control costs rather than improve profitability - particularly true for streaming media companies.