The thing to remember is that the Internet was never designed as a commercial, ad-friendly place. As many of its architects have noted, it would look very diffe

The thing to remember is that the Internet was never designed as a commercial, ad-friendly place. As many of its architects have noted, it would look very different if it were. That means trying to build an ad-supported business in a place that is - if not hostile - than at least fundamentally indifferent to the needs of ad-supported content producers was always going to be a tough row to hoe. If you succeed, well good for you. If not, don't feel too bad - the cards were stacked against you from the outset. In either case, the most important thing to remember is that Internet does not owe you a living. Nor does it owe advertisers an easy and easily controlled environment in which to operate. It has purposes that are significantly higher and deeper than hustling cheap, fast content while trying to make quick buck by selling your audience's personal details to fly-by-night ad networks. Not everyone operates like this, of course. Google, Facebook, and BuzzFeed are all examples of places with far cleaner models. All they sell is access. None of them make information available to others. Indeed, they all guard what they know very jealously. And Google aside, they haven't been vectors for piracy. But on balance, the Internet has been pretty terrible for people who work in the content industries, and the new media industries - in partnership with advertisers - have been pretty terrible for the Internet. You really need to go outside of this mutually debilitating flustercluck to find the truly awesome and wonderful things that the Internet makes possible. And many of these are things around which very good businesses can be built. For genuinely daring and visionary people, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. Here's what's not visionary, or helpful, or beneficial to humanity: trying to turn the Internet into a cheaper, faster, dirtier, amalgamation of print and broadcast media, only with much crappier advertising and a large helping of surveillance and malware thrown in. You're not saving the world with that crap. Indeed, you're the bad money that drives out the good, and the sooner your business model collapses, the better off the world will be. AdBlock on.