zlacker

>>pbrw+(OP)
Hot take, it’s hard to have a free internet without ads. Lots of websites have marginal utility, but can be paid for with ads. And those websites will disappear when CPM rates go down the drain.

>>thornc+X6
Lots of things like niche review sites might die, but those are impossible to find thanks to SEO spam (which is fueled by ads) anyway. Something like forums? The entire reddit database (excluding media) fits on a $150 SSD, and a used laptop can serve tens of thousands of requests/second for such a simple site. Something like a Ryzen 7950X with a few NVMe drives could probably do more than you could reasonably get a network connection for. Someone with 10 gigabit Internet could serve a forum for 10s of millions of users at least at almost no cost.

The primary issue is liability. Secondary is ISPs not allowing people to use their Internet connections for server hosting (a hobbyist could do colocation, and many do already). Fix the law there and the compute cost is peanuts.

>>ndrisc+dh
Product review sites seem like the perfect case for contextual advertising; no user tracking necessary at all.