News (especially national or global) is largely idle entertainment for middle class people, and comes with large servings of propaganda. Subscriptions/commerce

News (especially national or global) is largely idle entertainment for middle class people, and comes with large servings of propaganda. Subscriptions/commerce are fine. Productivity stuff IME is almost all FOSS or paid for. Ads tend to optimize for the opposite of productivity: engagement. Existing ad-free because the money comes from somewhere is the point. That somewhere is more ethical and prevents the conflicts of interest that make ad-based services inevitably worth their nominal price. Some obvious very high value parts of the Internet with no monetization: government services and information, free educational materials from pre-school through graduate university and research level, basically all software I use, creative commons music, art, and CAD designs, forums and blogs where world experts like Terence Tao post, forums and blogs where hobbyists post. If you look to the Internet for ways to improve your life, you'll find the associated resources (which I'd characterize as the high value parts of the Internet) generally have no ads. It should be obvious why.