I like the article, but I feel like there's an unquestioned premise everyone uses in these debates: > Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjo

I like the article, but I feel like there's an unquestioned premise everyone uses in these debates: > Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web, Is that true? There is definitely a lot of great ad supported stuff. No question. But does that mean that all great stuff is ad supported, or ad support is necessary for the web to function? I'm not getting paid through advertising for this comment. It's still content I created that you're reading. (I know, you're probably thinking it's not that great a comment either!) A lot of webmail is ad supported, but email wasn't always that way. We had several decades with usenet, user-side email servers, dial-up BBS's, early MUDs... in the late 90s there were a lot of early online multiplayer games. Now when a single player game (with a social layer!) fails, the servers die and it's not playable.[1] Back then when a near-MMO failed, the community just took over and hosted servers for free.[2] You basically just paid for a pipe and everyone tried to pitch in, contribute something interesting, or pile in with a little of their bandwidth.[3] I don't remember society scoffing and thinking, "nah, Internet doesn't have YouTube, it's a fad." Well, except Newsweek.[4] I think that if there were no ads, we would lose a lot of the great stuff online. But we'd have different cool stuff too, because there's always been some incentive to share interesting things with other people. Even if that only motivates one in a thousand people, turns out there are a lot of people online, and it fills up pretty quick.[5,6] The different cool stuff might be "obviously worse" in your imagination, but I'm not sure. Some days I feel nostalgia for the web of decades past. Then I usually fire up an ad-supported video on YouTube to reminisce, and try to ignore the irony.[7] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Online [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) [3] There's a paradoxical aside in Cryptonomicon about how the cost of bandwidth approaches zero over time, so, in theory, it can be treated as costless and abundant. Unfortunately this is a very asymptotic trend, and the needs for bandwidth increase proportionately, so in practice it's a significant and ever-present cost. [4] http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-buy-books-newspapers-straight-intenet-uh/ http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-bu... [5] http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-day-48-hours-of-video-uploaded-per-minute-1383495/ http://www.geek.com/news/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-da... [6] Most the people uploading videos to youtube will never get paid. Just because they theoretically could be paid doesn't mean most of them will, or that's their driving motivation. [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvch3eIoKQQ