> Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages wit

> Today’s consumers though have significantly higher standards than the original users of the web. Consumers want immersive experiences, well-designed pages with fonts, graphics, photos, and videos coming together into a compelling format. That “quality” costs enormous sums in engineering and design talent, not to mention massively increasing bandwidth and storage costs. Not really. Nowadays, it's truly a strike of luck if a page looks half-readable- hell, perhaps even readable at all if I haven't turned on JavaScript and let it load resources from three dozen different locations. And "immersive experiences"? I'm sure people will have plenty of chances to appreciate them when most sites bring their cellphones or laptops down to their knees, even if they are at most a couple years old. Ravenous subscription fees to replace formerly ad-supported content is not really much of a solution, it's just shifting the problem somewhere else. Sure, it might work for some services in which you effectively have a captive customer base (Thanks to vendor lock-in or a monopoly in your particular niche) or if said fees are kept low enough, but it's bound to end up as saturated as ad-supported content ended up being. Expect a raise in reports of freeloaders, account-sharers and see if the administrative/consumer support overhead is well worth it in the end.