> Without ads there would be basically no free content online
Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information.
Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines.
Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.
Firstly, I honestly don’t believe citation is needed on “people don’t work for free”.
We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
Yes there would be hobbyist information for free, but WebMD? News sites in general? Any sort of resource that takes money to pay people to maintain? It will all be pay gated.
As someone who does not use an adblocker, I have genuinely no problems finding the content I’m looking for.
> We’re seeing it already. Many if not most news sites are pay gating their once free content. Cite: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The New Yorker. All charge for access. All we’re free before the proliferation of ad blockers.
See? They found a way to put content online without relying on ads.
Most of the free content is generally crap outside of a few channels/sites. Almost all popular content on youtube/web is made with the intent to profit.
Yeah, what a weird example. Youtube and Instagram only gave bandwidth and storage away for free because they wanted to grow and be able to eventually monetize. They weren't charities one day that suddenly went "evil".
I meant to say that a lot of people are willing to do this "work" for free. That is not just content creators, but also system administrators e.d. I would be perfectly willing to run a forum for a group of like-minded people for free, but I'm not going to bother if there is already a subreddit for it.
Before Youtube, Facebook and the like, internet service providers included basic means of publication. Mail/mailing lists, homepages/blogs with RSS. They could do that again.
But, even if the barrier to publishing became higher and only 1/50th of the video's were put up on Youtube, it would still be far more than anyone could ever consume.
Citation needed. I don't believe that for one moment. Already people are producing far more content for free each second than one person could ever consume in a lifetime on sites like Youtube and Instagram. The urge is there, even without any monetary reward.
> Consider how much better the world has become due to easy access to information.
Now consider how much worse the world has become due to the incentive to hide wanted information behind commercial information. Simple example: there was a time before adblockers when it was not a rare sight to have a page with 80% advertising and 20% actual content. Think unskippable ads before videos. Think of the mountains of useless content that SEO spam produces that hide the interesting pages in search engines.
Marketing does not give access to information. On the contrary, it takes it away.