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's still a significant chu

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's still a significant chunk. They would survive quite easily without ads. 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's not necessarily an objectively good thing. Also, I wouldn't say that "people want to leach ... with out paying" 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's easier than it's been in a long time, perhaps ever, for a creator to support themselves, aside from ads, and it's only getting easier.