Unfortunately I don't see a good solution either. Large direct to consumer business models like SaaS or subscriptions are really only sustainable at scale, and

Unfortunately I don't see a good solution either. Large direct to consumer business models like SaaS or subscriptions are really only sustainable at scale, and even then it's dicey. In a SaaS model, the big fish win and we lose the democratic nature of the current internet. Society has driven the perceived price of content so low that the content itself is worth less than the aggregate audience. Really, in what other space does the average consumer set their price expectations at free AND balk at paying $5/mo for unlimited access to a product? The only thing that seems to come close to moving the needle towards privacy is somehow pushing advertisers into in-market advertising (think early internet-style site banner ads) and out of programmatic/user tracked ads. There is some evidence that these programmatic ads don't really perform as well as they claim but from what I can gather, the data is still unclear.