> With cable you’re paying the cable company, not the content providers.

Cable and satellite such as Comcast, Time Warner Cable or DirecTV pay networks like ESPN and TNT a certain amount PER CUSTOMER for programming content each month. The median price paid for each channel a subscriber gets is 14 cents. Sports content costs the cable company the most, ESPN was estimated to cost $8.37 per month in 2018, but arguably actually should cost much more if you consider time each channel is watched versus its cost:

https://www.thewrap.com/cable-network-carriage-fees/

https://variety.com/vip/pay-tv-true-cost-free-1234810682/

That's exactly the kind of BS Facebook would say to defend their ads for paying customers as well: “you're paying for the portal, not for the feed, the ads pay for the feed” or something like that.

In fact, I'm pretty sure Google will eventually do this for premium after some time: “you're paying the platform, ads are paying the content creators ”.