> You pay for cable TV but they sell you to advertisers.
That's not quite right. You pay your cable provider for television service. The cable provider pays networks for their content (the networks are the "suppliers" in this case). Some of those networks also collect payment from advertisers, but that advertising revenue probably wouldn't go to the cable company.
I dunno, Instagram did pretty well for itself, despite being an (iPhone exclusive!) app at first. For a while, they didn't even have a web interface for viewing images, much less posting them.
How would you feel about a government-sponsored search engine? I think China has one of those.