this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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The entire fucking web worked with no ads for literally years. I do not feel bad, and won't lament if companies can't afford to pay people to cram even more JavaScript into web pages.
Sorry, web developers. Your masters are making you do evil things. It isn't your fault, but I hate your jobs.
There were less than 200 websites in 1993 when the first paid ad was introduced shortly thereafter. There were over 100k websites by the end of 1995.
So you're kind of right, but ads have been part of the Internet for 30 years. And half of the internet that we know today wouldn't have survived if this wasn't the case.
Half of he internet is shit, so - again - I personally would not lament its loss. My mom, who lives in games like Farmville these days, probably would, but she'd probably be healthier and happier if she took up knitting again.
I concur. There's a sweet spot for ads where they are mostly tolerable. We haven't been in it for a long time though.
FOR YEARS!
August 1991 the web was made available to CERN, 1993 was the year it truly became open to the public and ads were introduced the same year...
I mean, I guess they were technically right? But it's the same as the "cable didn't have ads" bullshit people keep saying...
I think the difference was, they were just side banners and that's it. They didn't have all this insane tracking, data analysis, metrics, and knowing everything about you bullshit they do now.
And so have been adblockers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_blocking
It's probably worth noting that this has a lot to do with VCs pumping in a seemingly unlimited amount of funding for services that aren't profitable yet but has potential to be later. Hence why Twitter is still a thing despite running at a loss for almost its entire lifetime.
Well, if you don't mind losing all online content that's more than a couple mb in size then sure, what you're saying makes sense... Safely hosting over 1 billion videos costs money and people don't want to pay for it directly so...
Tens of millions of people can and do pay. This isn't about covering costs, this is about making line go up faster than last year, every year, no matter what.
And there's even more people that don't...
80m premium subscribers, 2.7b monthly users... Do you really think that's sustainable without having a secondary source of revenue? Because I don't know that many businesses that survive from 3% paying customers...
That's just for YouTube, but there are other websites that host content that wouldn't be sustainable without ads and that would need to switch to a paid subscription format.
Is it so hard to admit that there's something unusual about expecting websites to run out of the pocket of the owners/employees when we don't expect real world businesses to do so?
At $15 a month? Yeah totally. The vast majority of that 2.7 billion probably cost a few cents at most to offer service to. Very few people actually upload anything and streaming video is way cheaper than the various streaming services would have you believe. It's expensive to get off the ground, sure, but it scales well.
Repeat after me, Google isn't the only provider that hosts a lot of content.
Would you like it if the majority of websites became pay per use or subscription only?