No, not all my "media" was subsidized by ads before the internet. The author also fails to support the title, other than to weakly imply that somehow excluding ads on Netlifx has something to do with increased ad revenue on Facebook.
Sports is one area of media that will truly be disrupted as we’re already pushing the limit of what people will pay and advertising is no longer able to pay the difference.
In the specific case of Netlfix this probably isn't true as their business model is an online version of a business that already charged a subscription (cable TV).
However in businesses that traditionally relied on advertising e.g. the New York Times as mentioned in the article, the transition to the internet is leading to more upfront charging i.e. Paywalls because they aren't getting the ad revenue required to offer their services for free.
My personal take from the article isn't that all content use to be supported by ads (although I would suggest that a lot more of it was than most people realise). The issue is that the near duopoly Facebook and Google have on web advertising, mean those producing the content can no longer rely on advertising to fund themselves.
As a result we are seeing more and more paywalls being put up to fund these businesses. The potential end result of this is that finding content will continue to be free and probably even get easier. Finding content you can consume for free however, is likely to get a lot tougher.
There is only so much of a premium you can charge before no is willing to pay for your product.
No ads were involved in take-home videos, that I recall, other than late attempts at unskippable promos by the studios who released the movies themselves (that was after I gave up renting videos).
I don't see any causal relationship at all.
However when looking at the rise in the number of papers going behind a paywall like the NY times, there is an argument to be made that this is being driven by the fact it is no longer viable to run an ad supported business because Google and Facebook have control of too much of the market
But I took "media" to mean something more broad, including recordings, printed literature, and performances, which traditionally were mostly ad-free (excluding periodicals).