Websites tracking their users and shoving ads in their faces isn't really the "alternative" to paid services. It's something paid services often do in addition to charging money, because they're unwilling to leave any money on the table in any situation, and you can always get more money by charging your users and harvesting their data.
This is the other thing that pops up, in the rare instances where services like this are offered, they're often pretty inflated. It's notable that Youtube Premium comes with a music service and it's impossible to de-bundle them. I honestly think that part of the reason for this is to make people think that ad-free services aren't economically feasible.
I'm supposed to believe that the cost to Twitter to deliver ad-free and tracking-free text streams is higher than the cost for Netflix/Google to stream unlimited HD video to all of my devices on demand.
> The question is, how many premium ad-free subscriptions can one person get? YouTube? Tumblr? Twitter? Facebook? Insta? It could easily be $100 per month.
The thing is, what we're seeing is a push to monetize more services through subscriptions anyway. Like, this is a better argument if Twitter and Facebook aren't both pushing people to give them roughly $10 a month anyway.
I think that the advertising industry and traditional media companies have sold people on this idea that ads are somehow magically keeping the Internet free and and it would collapse otherwise, but if the trend continues and they all start charging anyway, then...
The price is not based on the cost to provide the service, it’s based on the current or potential revenue they can bring in via ads. A company won’t switch revenue models if it means a 50% reduction in revenue.
Eh, technically it's based on what the market will bear, but your comment also kind of demonstrates my point.
You can extrapolate out from what you've said to explain why the ads are not going away. Because if you can make $X with a paid service, and $X + $Y from ads, a company will do that. My point is, it's a mistake to think about "what would the Internet cost without ads." The sites will do whatever they can to make the most money possible, they are not going to leave ads and user tracking off of the table just because you gave them money. That would be throwing away revenue.
The framing of "this keeps the Internet free" is incorrect, the Internet will cost as much as is it can get away with costing, and the ads will just be another part of that equation. If the users tolerate the ads, then they'll get ads, regardless of what else the service is doing.