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What I got out of this article: Advertising has become so deeply entrenched into the medium(not just commercials) that it has become almost required to invoke a sense of commonality between the characters and the viewer. You are what you eat, in a sense. If its The Mindy Project and Tinder, or Mr. Robot and Starbucks it likely doesnt matter anymore as long as the logo finds its way into your eye sockets. In an effort to ease the process, the act of bashing the product in satire has become increasingly common. To put in other words, Colbert lied to you openly to get you thinking about a product.
"At this point, the model seems to morph every six months."

I stopped reading here. The model is ads and subscription revenue. Ads have been around forever. Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years. For instance HBO is decades old and they have even been producing original shows for over fifteen years. You also have some other revenue sources, like iTunes downloads. No huge change there. Cable operators have been selling pay-per-view for decades.

How is that "morphing every six months"?

What you got to what a set up for why that view ("seems") was wrong.

You wrote "Ads have been around forever"

A few paragraph later, which you didn't get to, the author says:

> This is both a new crisis and an old one. When television began, it was a live medium. Replicating radio, it was not merely supported by admen; it was run by them. In TV’s early years, there were no showrunners: the person with ultimate authority was the product representative, the guy from Lysol or Lucky Strike. Beneath that man (always a man) was a network exec. ...

> Advertisements shaped everything about early television programs, including their length and structure, with clear acts to provide logical inlets for ads to appear."

ending up with:

> This sponsor-down model held until the late fifties, around the time that the quiz-show scandals traumatized viewers: producers, in their quest to please ad reps, had cheated. Both economic pressures and the public mood contributed to increased creative control by networks, as the old one-sponsor model dissolved.

You write: "Subscription revenue has been around for at least twenty years."

The author's starting point is from before pay cable. ("Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet".) As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United... point out, that was nominally the late 1940s, but 'Original programming over cable came in 1972 with deregulation of the industry.'

And this is why I only watch content with access to fast froward button. No TV for me.
And yet, many movies and TV shows (including premium TV that features no commercials) feature some level of placements from advertisers, be it subtle or obvious. And everything falls victim; even The Martian has a plug for Under Armour.