Users may not want to pay for myriad of reasons, like unfair competition, or competition of lower quality where the user can't clearly determine the quality they receive, preconditioning and other existing biases, and so on.
How do you think our media found themselves in a continued decline over the last few decades? They were paid, but they had to focus on online presence and ads as low-quality blogs and fake news replaced them. People don't want to pay for quality journalism, because they can't tell the difference. This doesn't mean quality journalism doesn't provide value.
Furthermore, ads by themselves are not a bad service in our world. It's basically a business saying "hey I'm here, I have this to offer, if you want it". Is that such a bad concept? Of course there are scams, and so on. But that's not INHERENT to ads right? It's one thing to fight for higher quality ads, another to hate ads entirely.