I didn't do it by drawing a line between paid content and content-with-advertising, but over the past two years I've also dramatically cut the amount of TV I watch. I watch about one to three hours of non-sports television per week, on Hulu Plus or Netflix. My sports-watching is mostly background material while doing other stuff, and I don't have cable, but subscribe to things like MLB.TV for it, which (like Hulu Plus or cable) is a paid + advertising model. I did it as an experiment when moving to see how long I could get by without cable and a DVR and hours of TV shows per week, and found out I just didn't miss it that much at all. But for the stuff I do watch, I enjoy the big production budgets that advertising pays for.

But I still don't really want to pay any more for it than I already do. Commercials just pretty much wash over me (and internet banner ads I usually don't even notice at all). Sure, there's a not-really-personally-noticed branding effect, especially with interruptive TV ads, but I just don't care if my purchase of paper towels or whatever ends up subconsciously influenced by commercials.

But, all that said, and more back to the original topic, ads in apps are one of the areas where I'm more frequently willing to pay to remove them. It's a question of consuming versus using, and wanting to maximize my screen space.

And I think it's fascinating how easily iOS and Android (I don't remember any ads in Symbian smartphone apps, though I never really used Windows Mobile, so maybe they were there?) slipped the idea of in-app ads into the world, after the desktop app world avoided them for so long.