I happen to know a fair bit about a particular fairly popular content site. Ads make up a minority of their overall revenue, though it&#x27;s still a significant chunk. They would survive quite easily without ads.<p>The main advantage of ads is that they are potentially brain-dead easy to enable profitability if you have lots of traffic. But even then that&#x27;s not necessarily an objectively good thing.<p>Also, I wouldn&#x27;t say that &quot;people want to leach ... with out paying&quot; is accurate whatsoever. Between merch, events, crowd funding, and patronage (patreon et al) there is a massive and rapidly growing amount of money that has been going to content creators direct from content consumers. It&#x27;s easier than it&#x27;s been in a long time, perhaps ever, for a creator to support themselves, aside from ads, and it&#x27;s only getting easier.