Paying to have commercials removed may not imply that your activity is not spied on, then the corresponding data not sold to third parties. You "locally" (on the site you paid) escape from advertising, indeed, but for the rest...

It's not only about allowing customers to pay for their share of ad revenue in order to remove it the ads. But to also enter new markets of customers.

For example I would never subscribe to a service with ads, regardless of price. The Hulu tier that includes ads would have to pay me about $30/mo before I would consider switching from the ad free tier.

The number might be unrelated to ad revenue at all and they figured that was the perfect threshold between capturing the highest number of "cheaper" subscribers while also maximizing new ad-free subscribers.

But it was 50% higher... that’s indeed a lot.

But "a lot" can still be insignificant. Imagine an ant falling from 1 meter, it would live, but would have fallen thousands of times its own height.