Free*
There's no such thing as free lunch.
But that's not what we're told. Facebook is free. Youtube is free. Radio is free.
Of course, in truth, these things aren't free, they're free*.
*A cost which is obfuscated and/or abstracted to a degree where it does not directly involve currency.
Whether this is good or bad is probably less interesting than asking, "is this avoidable?" The bedrock of media for as long as its existed has been advertising.
Maybe advertising is the required cost distribution mechanism to get otherwise expensive technologies to the masses, and maybe it’s not.
Are we too far down the rabbit hole to imagine an alternative?