I agree that it is a greek tragedy that it always comes to this, but this is just the market’s way of monetizing the medium. This is how it happens. We used to sit through 20 minutes(!) of commercials every hour for tv content. Now we download one or two magnitudes more data than is required so that the content we actually want is “free”. Efficient markets will always devolve to this unfortunately.

At least this (compared to unskippable commercials of past) I can bypass looking at.