Expecting social media and news media to be free without ads is unsustainable and incredibly naive

Far too often I see people complaining about ads everywhere on various value add online services like news media and social media websites that have an ad free subscription available. What do you people expect, everything to be 100% free? Sorry to break it to you but that’s not how the world works. These services cost money to run, from the servers and internet bandwidth to provide the content to the people that create the content and everything else that happens behind the scenes. None of that is free and the companies/people behind the service need to make money to pay for these things somehow. If you aren’t willing to pay for it, someone else does by paying for advertisement space on that service.

Take YouTube for example, there is a huge amount of overhead to run all those servers, pay creators for the quality content they create and pay people at Google to manage all that. Paying for YouTube Premium removes all the ads and provides the money to Google that’s required to run all that, but what other choice does Google have to pay for all that if people want to just consume it without paying? Well they turn to ads. Same goes for the creators on the platform. If they can’t make enough money from YouTube through their monetization methods then they’ll turn to putting in their own ads and sponsorships. People blocking ads directly leads to this happening and it has become increasingly difficult to run a quality YouTube channel that doesnt just pump out slop with the ad revenue payouts from YouTube alone.

That said, if a subscribed service still has ads on things in that service, flame them all you want. This unpopular opinion is targeted at people complaining about ads in the free to them service.