I listen to music on Spotify, I watch shows and movies on Netflix and Amazon Video. I buy my video games on GOG and Steam. I buy my books and read them on my Kindle.
What does that leave? I don't pay for YouTube, for example. Not that I care that much, because the stuff I watch on YouTube is mostly not the stuff I would miss. The stuff I would miss would probably be available even if YouTube didn't exist (e.g. Zero Punctuation).
Since we're talking about paying, here's another question: do I resort to piracy? Yes, because there are often good reasons to do so.
Movies and shows? Netflix and Amazon mostly don't have subtitles in Spanish, so when I wanna watch something with my wife, sometimes the only way is to download it.
Music? I'd love to be able to come to some agreement with Spotify that lets me save a number of songs a month or a year and let them be mine, so they'll never disappear from my playlist just because Spotify pulled them.
Books? Usually the first book I read from an author I haven't read before is a book I'll pirate. If it's good, I'll buy it and buy that author's subsequent books. We used to use libraries for that kind of stuff.
As you can see, most of those problems aren't solvable by ads.
Here's a question for you, though: do you think Wikipedia would be better off with ads?
