Is the era of "free" ad-supported stuff over?
It's been dying pretty fast. Everything is moving towards subscription, although a backlash is building on that too. Ads, as controlled by Google, just don't pay all the bills. They allow for subsistence survival like peons in the field. And Google has never really opened their books to reveal their real profit margins on network ads so it's hard to see if other ad arrangements with publishers might work better. Especially with Google controlling both discovery (search), search ads, and publishers ads. We do know Google has made record profits for 20 years while publishers and search competitors have starved. Only rival networks which generate their own traffic (ie. AMZ, FB, Twitter) have been able to open any inroads into the advertising monopoly.
The other factor relates directly to user tracking and individual privacy.
It used to be that high volume, sites with the right demographics of readers, could command a higher price for ads, back when they were selling their own ads. Google, by tracking users across the internet, made the user more important than the website the ad was displayed on. They switched the rules of the ad game and undermined the publishers.
