> An internet composed of relevant and useful information stored as light weight documents could easily (and used to) exist without advertising. Any concrete t

> An internet composed of relevant and useful information stored as light weight documents could easily (and used to) exist without advertising. Any concrete traffic measurements between those sites then and now? I'd be extremely surprised if traffic didn't shoot up by orders of magnitude. That's also assuming that no ads means we'd go back to the mid-90s internet. Pretty sure there are still companies that would like to do business online, even without targeted ads. The tactics would change, that's it. > Without ads we probably wouldn’t have millions of identical recipe sites with infuriating backstories, pop ups, share buttons, in-line promotions, etc. True for pop-ups, in-line promotions or ads. But SEO will be a thing as long as we have search engines. Hell, earlier search engines were getting gamed with keyword stacking all the damn time. Bringing you on the page and showing you ads wouldn't be enough to make money, but I don't see how you'd even get rid of sites wanting traffic. Unless you're really advocating for getting rid of commercially motivated sites - which I'll assume you're not, as it is kind of delusional, IMHO. > we would still have people sharing their grandmother’s apple pie recipe on personal sites along with a few paid services that add real value instead of SEO garbage and social fluff That's a whole lot of extrapolation, and a rather subjective judgement call. Hell, one could definitely call this very site "social fluff".