Those are all valuable things. The ad free ones are the exceptions. More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Virtually all news sites, regardless of what side you agree with, are composed mostly of garbage designed to draw your attention, not inform you about things that really matter. They may provide some value in addition to that, but the advertising model ensures that they must hack your attention as their primary goal.
> Basically all entertainment has ads (or subscriptions).
Similarly, our entertainment options were better before they had to be designed to keep you on a specific streaming platform for a certain length of time.
> Productivity stuff is either full of sales or upsells, aka ads, or alternatively sell your data (for future ads).
Depends on who you're buying productivity stuff from. My Fastmail account does just fine with no ads and no data sales, and covers basically everything I need. Most other "productivity" tools I've tried have felt palpably exploitative.
> More over they only exist ad free because the money comes from elsewhere.
Ad-funded products are a civilization-wide trap like credit card rewards. They create an illusion that things are coming for free, but companies don't do this out of charity—they pay for ads because they have good data that strongly suggests that the people who see them will, on average, pay them back and more.
I'd rather make the cost of a service explicit than hide it behind hard-to-quantify behavioral hacks.
I listened to "The Shadow" radio episodes from the 1940s, sponsored by "Blue Coal". At 0:45 of https://www.beyondthebreaker.com/the-shadow-of-blue-coal/ "All signs point to a severe winter. Be prepared! If you want to be sure of even, dependable, helpful heat in any kind of weather, insist on Blue Coal. America’s finest anthracite mined from the fields of northern Pennsylvania. The coal that is colored a harmless blue at the mine for your protection."
That's about 20 seconds, and the blue color was 'a marketing ploy to distinguish its coal from that of its competitors. But the company took it one step further by actually promoting its product as being superior, longer burning, and even more “healthful” than other coal. No wonder the PR “spin” profession was so poorly regarded in that era!'
Also, 1971's "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke", was 1 minute long, and did not inform.
Existing ad-free because the money comes from somewhere is the point. That somewhere is more ethical and prevents the conflicts of interest that make ad-based services inevitably worth their nominal price.
Some obvious very high value parts of the Internet with no monetization: government services and information, free educational materials from pre-school through graduate university and research level, basically all software I use, creative commons music, art, and CAD designs, forums and blogs where world experts like Terence Tao post, forums and blogs where hobbyists post.
If you look to the Internet for ways to improve your life, you'll find the associated resources (which I'd characterize as the high value parts of the Internet) generally have no ads. It should be obvious why.