Ads suck, they're on the decline because everyone is discovering blockers, they pester 99% of the people with things they'll never click on, require a force against privacy, generates money for a small group of companies, and generally favours quanity-content over meaningful-content (i.e. a meaningful documentary impacting the lives of 5000 people will generate pennies, whereas a cat video that one million watch and may or may not have substantial impact, makes orders of magnitudes more money).

Ads are also lovely, I get your point... but let's not pretend it's not great to see an alternative which doesn't suffer (as much) from the above issues, and can build genuine interaction/support/community between creators and users of content.