> And yes, nothing is completely "free" - I'm just arguing about monetary access. Ads means you're paying with attention which has it's own costs and externalities.
Just wrote that in another comment. For the mainstream audience of 3 billion people online, the monetary cost outweighs the rest.
The logical consequence of such statement is that the ad brokers/trackers/data miners pay themselves by printing their own money.
Of course this makes no sense, and thus the statement is certainly flawed. There is a cost to end user -- it's just very well obfuscated.