[p10_user]

Your note on affiliate marketing is what makes your first statement potentially unachievable. How does a consumer "know" that a product is significantly better to the point of "worth paying for"? There's always another free (potentially ad supported) affiliate marketer (or 5) around the corner. (Also considering the "worst" version of this "product" is an unskippable ad").

I don't know the solution

[dawalker]

Fair. The best solution we've seen is building the product in some way where it's somewhat defensible, either through data, features that bigger players won't build, etc. and then using a subscription based model if users are willing to pay for that and value the searches high enough or using an ads based model if you're optimizing for traffic rather than pure value on each search.