> The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people
I think that doesn't hold logical water.
If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap.
A related phenomenon is the way online games make their money.
The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-maker depends on for their business.
