zlacker

Large parts of what you know today as the Internet are ad-funded as opposed to user/donation funded. Without this ad revenue being available to the web, not so many websites and applications would have been born.

Youtube did not even think of charging premium so many years after launching as a free service.

Do you think they would have been that successfully were it not for the user base aka free eye-balls?

> There is nothing that says that we must be forced to tolerate ads in exchange for the internet

While true but this is the way the game and the field has been setup. Same thing that explains why you see ads on even on paid devices. Why be content with 5$, when you know you can shake 6$ from a customer?

I am for privacy. Believe me. But this battle is not winnable when you make up 5% of the sober group and the rest are happy and drunk in love with Clubhouse or whatever new social media drug that is the rage.

>>freebu+(OP)
Vimeo was working the paid angle around the time that Youtube launched, and it wasn't under water. Youtube was successful because they _purposefully_ (and so, criminally) refused to take down copyrighted content because they were aiming to grow fast enough and large enough to be purchased by Google.

It's not just Youtube/Vimeo; for instance, Flickr was a premium paid service around the time that Facebook launched, and it wasn't under water, either.

These "freemium" services were able to act as _hideously unprofitable_ loss leaders for the large advertisement firms, and so take down the non-advertisement-funded competition.

It was predatorial monopolistic practices that gave us the current web.