I feel like you're not getting the vision. It would be the same process as subscribing, but money just gets drained from a pool per ad instead of a flat monthly fee. It's not something you're seeing a popup for. And it would never cost 5x what an ad costs. It would only ever cost $4 to watch a video without an ad if an advertiser was willing to spend $4 to show you an ad. To put that in perspective, ad impressions are bought in units of cpm which stands for cost per mille which is the amount they pay for one thousand impressions. That would be $4,000 cpm. That's absolutely insane. That's orders of magnitude more than what it is today. Nobody is ever going to spend that much to show you an ad unless it's some crazy profitable, super targeted, ultra niche campaign.

The whole point of this thought exercise is to explore what companies make in a month from ads versus what they charge for a month of ad free service. People bid for your attention. I think I should be able to bid for it myself instead of paying some opaque, flat rate per month.