I'm the guy you're arguing with upthread, but I agree with this one. I've never seen an ad on Netflix. But Hulu, Prime, and (I think) Paramount+ all show ads to

I'm the guy you're arguing with upthread, but I agree with this one. I've never seen an ad on Netflix. But Hulu, Prime, and (I think) Paramount+ all show ads to their paid subscribers. Although Paramount and Prime mostly limit their ads to promotions for their own shows, whereas Hulu sells slots to outside advertisers. (And this is ignoring the $100+ monthly cost of traditional cable packages that show at least a minute of ads for every two minutes of content, on every channel). And ok, maybe those streaming services offer ad-free plans, but that's moving the goal posts from the original impetus of subscribing to the first (and initially only) tier of a non-free plan (e.g. YouTube Premium in this analogy) explicitly to opt out of ads. And in fact its further evidence that future YouTube will likely offer a paid tier that includes ads, which would negate the primary argument for using any paid tier from them now (if you give a mouse a cookie...)