Sitting through a minute of commercials doesn't seem too steep a price to pay for that service, especially if the service is free. One of the biggest myths of the Web is that advertisers get information about their viewers. Web sites hold this up as a major selling point to advertisers. Well, there's some of that going on, but not much. For the most part, it's smoke and mirrors.
Web sites know very little about their visitors.
In cases where they can track information that's really valuable to advertisers, there are the privacy issues. Privacy issues are delicate and not easily resolved. From the advertisers' perspective, knowledge about the user is very valuable. Consumers typically don't care how advertisers feel. It's hard for advertisers to get a good bearing on things because every site is different.