The valuable parts of the internet are, with few exceptions, ad-free. Forums like HN, personal blogs and sites, paid services—these are the places where real value is to be found on the internet.

The ad-funded content and services are almost universally low quality and designed exclusively to hack brains to keep them scrolling, not provide real value. What few exceptions there are to this rule are not worth the enormous drain on society that the ad-funded model has been.

> and as far as I can tell that is far less popular than the ad model we have.

This is a classic market failure. Corporations have figured out how to manipulate people into pursuing the corporation's interest (scroll indefinitely through pages and pages of ads and spend money on the things so advertised) at the expense of the consumer's interest (do anything else with their time and money). Popularity is irrelevant when it's clearly achieved by exploitative design, not value delivered.