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People are "voting with their feet", as they always have. As long as there have been ads people have been trying to escape them. When VCRs came out with a record function the first (only?) use I heard about from everyone was recording shows you want to watch and actually consuming them later so you could skip the ads.
Just because you like a certain financial model doesn't mean you have some right to it. I despise it, and given how much effort people are willing to invest to avoid ads, I think a strong argument can be made that it's simply incorrect. Content creators also don't have any right to making a living via their content. People do not want ads, for the most part, so if they can't find a way to sell their product without the ad model then it's just another business that failed like millions of others.
Paid news content indeed lost to free content. I don't think that proves the ad model is somehow superior. People were happy to read news when they could ignore the ads and pages loaded fast enough. I suspect people might be more open to paying for news again now if a reasonable micro-transaction model existed, except that the news has gotten so poor it's hard to justify paying anything for most of it.
I don't expect it. But they do it. Is your expectation truly that I sit there and try to concentrate on some advertisement which I've already seen (well, had playing in the background while I wait for my content to start again) dozens or even hundreds of times before because of... I don't know, some capitalism-reglious piety?
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