I don't hate ads because they're annoying. I hate them because of what they tell you about a company's future.
There's a pattern I've watched repeat itself enough times that I no longer see it as coincidence. A product launches with a clean pitch: no ads, no tracking, just pay for the thing, or use it for free and enjoy it. It grows. It gets good. People love it. And then, somewhere on the way to becoming a "platform" or hitting a growth ceiling, advertising shows up. Not as an option. As the plan all along, just delayed until the user base was large enough to monetize.
I've stopped believing this is an accident of individual companies making individual bad decisions. It looks structural. Once a company reaches a certain scale, advertising stops being one revenue stream among several and starts being the only one that scales as fast as the growth targets demand.
Why growth always finds its way to ads
Subscription revenue is linear. You get one customer, you get one customer's worth of money, and the only way to double it is to double the customers. Eventually everyone who was ever going to pay your price is already paying it, and the line flattens. That ceiling is not the size of the population. It's the size of the population at that price, which is a much smaller number and one you can hit surprisingly early.
Advertising solves a different problem. It lets you move the price. Put a cheaper tier in front of the people who were never going to pay full freight, sell their attention to make up the difference, and a market you had exhausted opens back up. The ad tier is not advertising bolted onto a subscription. It is a lower price that needed a second revenue stream to survive.
It's worth being precise that this is not the better business. Ad revenue is worse revenue. It's cyclical, it falls off a cliff when advertiser budgets do, and per user it usually earns less than the subscription sitting next to it. Investors pay a premium for recurring revenue for exactly that reason: it is the more predictable kind.
Which is the part that gives the game away. Companies take the worse, more volatile revenue anyway, because it grows and the good revenue has stopped growing. That trade is this entire essay in one line: when the quality of revenue and the growth of revenue conflict, growth wins.
This is why "free, ad-supported" was never really the interesting case. The more revealing pattern is what happens to services that were never free to begin with.
Google: the founders wrote the warning themselves
Google is where everyone starts, and the usual version of the story is wrong. Google did not begin as an advertising company. It began in 1998 as a search engine with no ads and no revenue model at all, built by two graduate students who were better at ranking pages than anyone else alive.
Here is the part worth sitting with. In the paper that introduced it, Brin and Page added an appendix about advertising, and concluded that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." They gave a concrete example: a search engine that would not return an airline's own homepage when you searched the airline's name, because the airline had bought that query.
They saw it exactly. They wrote it down, in public, under their own names, in the founding document of the company. AdWords launched two years later.
I don't read that as dishonesty, and that's precisely why it unsettles me. It is the strongest evidence I have that this is structural rather than a question of character. If the two people who identified the bias most clearly, who had every reason not to become their own example, still arrived there inside twenty-four months, then this is not a pressure that good intentions survive.
Google only gets the argument half way, though, because Google was free. You can accept every word of that story and still land somewhere comfortable: the problem was that I wasn't the customer, so from now on I'll pay for things and I'll be fine.
That was more or less my own conclusion, and I held it for years. Then a company I was already paying added ads anyway.
Netflix: the case that actually convinced me
Netflix was something I paid for specifically to avoid this exact problem. No ads was the pitch. It was practically the whole reason a monthly subscription felt worth it over broadcast television.
Then Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier, and with it the quieter shift underneath: a subscription business, one that had been profitable without advertising, still reached for it the moment subscriber growth stalled. That's the detail that stuck with me. It wasn't "advertising is what free products eventually need." It was "advertising is what growth needs, whether or not the product was ever free in the first place." A company doesn't need to be broke to reach for ads. It just needs its board to expect a number that subscription growth can no longer deliver on its own.
What advertising actually distorts
Once ad revenue enters the picture, it doesn't stay in its lane. It reshapes the product itself, usually in three ways.
The most visible is UX: autoplay, pop-ups, notification spam, feeds engineered to keep you scrolling a few seconds longer than you meant to. This is the layer people complain about most, and it's also the shallowest.
Less visible, but more consequential, is privacy: tracking, fingerprinting, cross-service profiling. Infrastructure that exists purely to make the advertising more precisely targeted, built quietly enough that most users never see it operating.
The deepest layer is the one that's hardest to point to directly. The product's own design philosophy starts optimizing for engagement metrics rather than for the thing the user actually came for. A search engine's job stops being "give the best answer" and starts being "keep the user inside the ecosystem long enough to serve one more impression." Nobody announces this shift. It just shows up, slowly, in a thousand small product decisions.
Stepping away, and not just from Google
At some point I stopped treating this as a Google problem and started treating it as a big-tech problem. I moved my email and a few other core services to Proton, less because I distrust Google's engineering, which is excellent, and more because I no longer wanted my daily infrastructure to run on a company whose core incentive is extracting attention. The concrete version of that, the part I actually objected to, was how much of my life it collected in order to sell against it. That collection isn't a separate grievance from the advertising. It is the advertising, wearing an engineering diagram. I switched my browser to LibreWolf for the same reason: I wanted something that starts from the assumption that I'm the customer, not the product.
I also left X for Mastodon, which is the clearest version of the third distortion above. On an ad-funded social network the feed is not a feature that happens to carry advertising. The feed is the advertising product, and every ordering decision inside it is answering a question about impressions rather than a question about what you wanted to read. Mastodon's advantage isn't that the people running it are more virtuous. It's structural: there is no board, no quarterly number, and no growth target for advertising to eventually become the answer to. A thing that isn't trying to grow has nothing to sell you out for.
I should be honest that ads weren't my only reason for leaving X. The Japanese-language timeline had become unpleasant in a way that made me not want to open it. Some of that is genuinely downstream of the argument I'm making here, because a feed ranked by engagement will find that conflict outperforms agreement and act accordingly. But not all of it is, and I'd be stretching to claim otherwise. Some of it was just the people who stayed. A recommendation algorithm can amplify a culture without having created it, and I can't cleanly separate the two from the outside.
I left Microsoft too, though there advertising was only part of it: an OS that gets heavier with every update, first-party apps pushed on you whether you asked or not, telemetry that behaves like something you'd normally want antivirus software to catch. Ads in the Start menu are a symptom rather than the diagnosis.
Which is the more general point. What matters is the priority ordering, not the form it takes: growth metrics first, user experience optimized only insofar as it serves them. Sometimes that surfaces as ads. Sometimes as bloatware. Same disease, different symptoms.
A small, deliberate inconvenience
None of this is a purity project. I still use plenty of software built by companies whose incentives I don't fully trust, because avoiding that entirely isn't realistic in 2026. But where an alternative exists that lets me be a customer rather than an inventory item, I take it, even when it costs more or does less out of the box. Proton over Gmail. LibreWolf over Chrome. Mastodon over X. Paying for the thing directly, when paying is an option, rather than assuming "free" means what it says.
It's a small form of resistance, and I don't think it scales into any kind of movement. But it's the version of the problem I actually have control over: which infrastructure I choose to run my life on, and whose growth targets I'm quietly helping to fund every time I open an app.