> But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. 1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody

> But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. 1. Much of the internet simply doesn't need to exist. If nobody is willing to pay for something, maybe it doesn't have value. 2. For a lot of what does have value, the problem might be your idea of what a "viable business model" is. If I write a weekly blog post and it makes $2000 a month, that's a viable business model. It's more than a lot of writing jobs pay. But it doesn't scale into some sort of multinational content corp so half of the people involved in the conversation are willing to write it off. 3. A lot of sites simply don't need to be businesses. I've paid hosting costs and helped moderate to help run forums, with no expectation of financial recompense, simply because I enjoyed the community. The best forums nearly universally work this way, still. The real value of Reddit, for example, comes from subreddit moderators who are typically volunteers. Everything I value about Reddit is provided by people who don't work for Reddit, and the hosting/software could easily be swapped out with minimal impact for most of these communities. In fact, all the problems I've had with Reddit are caused by Reddit's decisions--I've never had a problem with an AskScience or ProgrammingLanguages moderator policy change, but Reddit makes some decision that harms their users significantly probably twice a year.