What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay (e.g., search engines and social media)? I think it's reasonable to have advertising-supported services, it just needs to be clear up front. I don't mind dropping Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services for Blu-Ray ripping and Plex if it gets too expensive, even with ads.
While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."
>What if the service costs more to deliver than the market is willing to pay
What if I don't have enough money to buy something and I want it anyway!