I wonder how YouTube’s numbers have faired it seems that your always reaching for the mouse to shut them off. I’ve cut back on my viewing. The subscribe to avoid ads seems like blackmail to me!
Careful. Blackmail is a pretty strong term and really not accurate. Any of the web service providers have the right to put on as much advertising as they would like. That's pretty obvious the trend when you surf the web nowadays.
And the advertisers have to decide if that massive amount of ads on web sites is actually effective or if it has a detrimental effect. This forum has the right to put advertising on too. Even for the people who pay unless there is an explicit agreement to not do it for people who pay.
The question is at what point do people change their 'habits' and choose something different. Most of the people I know rarely go on facebook anymore. The original idea that it was a meeting place for friends and acquaintances became monetized with directed advertising targeted based on a click. Likely any 'package' of advertising added to a forum like this will also do the same at some level.
My guess is that this will be with us for a while. After all the movie theaters were allowed to do subliminal advertising until the government moved in and stopped it. So those against government interference would likely have used the old 'saw' the movie goers will decide if they want to go to a theater that has subliminal adverts. But it's no longer allowed thank goodness.
At one point TV programming was only allowed to have so many minutes of advertising per hour. I think that's been allowed to lapse or changed to be the average over a 24 hour period. So from 1AM to 5AM reruns with only promos and no advertising covers extra advertising allowed during prime time. Again the anti-government view is if there's too much advertising people will just move somewhere else. In a lot of ways Netflix and Prime, to mention only a couple are that model. Except now you have to pay to view, the bottom of your smart TV has a row of icons of content providers and unless you block specific IP addresses you also get a pile of advertising when you first switch on the TV. Try it without a network connected to see the difference when you power up. And that's the only way to block that. You can't turn it all off on an LG TV.
That's largely the attitude with network advertising in forums etc. The users will chose. Keep the government out. The cost of running this forum starts with the price list here:
https://xenforo.com/ The money has to come from somewhere. The senior users will eventually get tired unless they get some value.