> I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face.

You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.

Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:

a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins

b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.

This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.

One reason I like Brave having a subscription for ad-free search.

> prefer to pay for a service

There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).

While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.

>a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it

I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,

>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.

I think another, bigger, piece is that people have more issue paying for upfront costs than marginal costs. Most people will have some sort of outrage that their medication costs the manufacturer 30c to produce when they're told it'll cost $30 to buy. Sure, there was the whole discovery process that had an upfront cost, but to most people's intuition, the cost of goods should be "cost to make + some small markup".

For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.

> the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?"

I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.

Google absolutely wouldn't mind if you paid in money for your mail. They sell it to lots of paying subscribers.

https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/

No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.