This is the post hoc fallacy though isn't it? It also neglects the many ways that advertising on the internet caused a LOT of serious problems, especially in th

This is the post hoc fallacy though isn't it? It also neglects the many ways that advertising on the internet caused a LOT of serious problems, especially in the early days around the first dot-com bust. For some reason you seem to fall into the trap of thinking that ads vs "begging" are the only options, though that's not going to be true, isn't true now, and hasn't been true for literally decades. There are tons of ways to make money with a non-paywalled content site on the internet, as witnessed by... the many ways that people have been making money on such things for going on two decades.