By that logic businesses that buy advertising have supported nascent technologies as they develop. When newspapers were new and the main way of disseminating in

By that logic businesses that buy advertising have supported nascent technologies as they develop. When newspapers were new and the main way of disseminating information that's what they used and happened to "support" as a byproduct. If you read an old scientific american from 1845 the last page was all ads. That's where eyeballs were. As the internet developed now they support millions of websites as byproducts, many that would never exist otherwise. The ad industry has many bad things but it has for example allowed me to pay for my expenses during university because as a highschool student making small free tool-like websites to learn, and with traffic it ended up allowing me to go to a good university in the country's capital instead of a shitty one in my hometown. And there's probably millions of such stories. This to me is way more democratic than "just" supporting newspapers which by now are just part of huge conglomerates. Even your "local" newspapers and news stations are all just part of a couple of conglomerates. https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2022/07/13/barons-state-of-local-news/ https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/posts/2022/07/1...