Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertisin

Not to mention that treating ad-funded as equivalent to free arrogantly assumes that I, personally, am somehow immune to the manipulation inherent in advertising. Companies pay for ads because they have good reason to believe that some significant percentage of people who see them will buy something that they otherwise would not have bought. They spend enormous sums setting up the infrastructure to attribute sales to specific ads. Meanwhile we, the consumers, have no really good way to quantify how much drains from our bank accounts each year due to the ads we see. Might I be the exception to the rule and be un-manipulatable? Possibly. But I don't have a strong reason to bet on it, and I'd rather see the price of the service listed outright as a subscription than simply hope that the ad-funded version will net to a lower cost for me.