I'm sorry but I just cannot imagine a way to make ad-supported media work. It can't and shouldn't work. Advertisers want to spend money to misinform the public; you can't then take this money to fund news, an operation that's ostensibly supposed to inform the public.
It's just a fundamentally insane business model. If you believe in news for news' sake, then ad-supported news is... trying to do enough good to outpace the harm being done by the funding mechanism for the news.
In the internet era, most ad-supported outlets that were doing interesting work were managing this kind of by scamming advertisers? Like the economics of it never made sense on the web, at all, but advertisers were unsophisticated so they kept putting money towards these outlets.
As advertisers became marginally more sophisticated, there's a drive to guarantee that ad dollars were translating to the deliberate harm that advertisers want to inflict. That drive is always going to choke out outlets doing interesting work, because advertisers would prefer a world where people are just groping through a maze of chumboxes.
all the big tech companies want to collect as much data about your preferences, demographics, etc. because if you assume there's only a certain number of users to advertise to, the only way to grow in value and satisfy shareholders is to make ads have a higher click-through-rate (CTR). the way to do THAT is to make the ads more and more targeted, that is, to show people ads they're more likely to engage with.
so in a lot of ways, the biggest ad platforms among tech companies are by necessity coupled to what amounts to a system for collecting data about users. companies don't just want to show you ads. they want to know everything about you.
and they want to show you ads that get a strong reaction, whether that's ads that outrage you, confuse you, or actually interest you. they want you to spend as much time per day as possible on their platform so you have more time to be shown ads.
so in summary, the incentives are to make platforms that are outrage generation machines or addictive skinner boxes, that you give all your data to in exchange for "free" entertainment
