So to follow your analogy, they eat meat by stealing it, and feel like they are sending a message about animal welfare.
You are arguing on the premise that ads would somehow be a fair exchange. That is simply the opposite of the truth. Ads are parasitic. Services with ads are almost always worse than services without, not just by having ads but also in every other way. Ads do not incentive quality, they incentive treating your users as prey and feeding them SEO slop.
I want to compensate people for actual beneficial work they do. But with most for profit internet services that is simply not possible. If you give them a finger they will take your whole arm. For exampme I want to buy good movies. But I simply cannot. All I can "buy" is a pinky promise from them to let me watch a movie under their conditions which they can change at any time under their sole discretion and they can just revoke that possibility for me completely at any time. Would I pay for Netflix they would only give me 720p no matter how much money I give them, because I have to much control over my own hardware for them.
There are exceptions to this that I happily pay for, but those are all niche services that cater to the small group of people like me.
But they went bankrupt in 2017.
Why? Because people don't want to view ads and they don't want to pay a subscription. Vid.me was unable to monetize and collapsed.
Nebula is a more recent example. Creators falling over themselves to promote it, yet conversation rates are still <1%.
It's not anti-competitive practices killing these companies. It's childish entitled users who get offended when asked to compensate.
But I suppose expecting ad-free video streaming 'just because I paid for it' is also entitled and childish, because to people who use those things as putdowns, everything other people want, is. It's like "everything I don't like is woke" in that sense.
The ad-free version is available if you cover the cost of lost ad revenue.
Just because you pay doesn't mean there will be no ads. And just because there are ads doesn't mean there is an ad free service available.
This is how smart TVs can be bought for $300. It's a $600 TV but you pay for half of it in smart TV ads.
