You don't even need the scare quotes -- that's exactly the conversation. The people making these decisions genuinely don't see ad-free as a feature, just a nice-to-have convenience that some weirdos will pay a premium for. And broadly speaking, they're right. When you offer a cheaper option with ads people choose it -- a lot of people choose it.
The biggest barrier to services adding ads isn't anything like enshittification or market lock-in or whatever, it's that ad-delivery is hard and it takes large, mature company with lots of users to both sport the manpower to get it done and enough eyeballs to make the ROI positive. All those little stupidly named ad-supported streaming platforms that are popping up are almost always backed by a larger company's ad network. Tubi is Fox, Xumo is Comcast, Freevee is Amazon.
> The people making these decisions genuinely don't see ad-free as a feature, just a nice-to-have convenience that some weirdos will pay a premium for.
That would be fine if they respected us enough to say "ad-free is too niche of a feature to be worth it to us, we're pulling it".
