I don't think the advertisement companies (or rather, their lawyers) like to see it as consumer that pay for content by watching adds. Any transaction between a company and a consumer of monetary value need to be accounted and taxed, and advertisement based industries has an EU exception that explicitly states that content/products that has advertisement attached is not a transaction, since the viewer may watch 0 seconds, watch the whole add, or anything between, and thus there is no expectations of payment between a producer and consumer. There is also none of the usually consumer protection when dealing with such products.

The model that those companies deploy is that they give away, for free, the product, in the statistically prediction that enough people will happen to watch the ads in order to make it profitable. That is the deal.