I'm anti-cloud. e.g. I run my own mail server and do web hosting for fun. I have a poster of Snowden in my office.

But I signed up for Pocket because it does two things very well. It lets me send things to my Kobo e-reader via email and gets around pay-walled content. I don't recall ever seeing ads either.

I don't pay for the service because I don't need the for-pay features, but would in fact pay for the basic service if it wasn't free. I wouldn't even mind if they in turn payed NYT, New Yorker, etc for the content I'm getting.