Is the free thing really an issue? TV and Radio were free for decades and both still are. TV switched to cable, through broadcast still exists, but radio is still free. I'm not convinced advertising is insidious. Maybe because I grew up with it. I used to pay for ads. Magazines in the 80s and 90s had ads and we bought them not just for the article but to see what new products were being announced. You can go look through them on the archive. They're 70% ads and yet we loved them.
https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing
https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_09-10_1984-09_Computer_...