My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.

Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.

Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.

People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.