How will search engines make money if not by ads? How will free webmail providers exist?
How do other businesses do it? By providing goods and services the customer wants at a fair price. Radical I know, it’s only worked for like, thousands of years...
Ads provide wealth redistribution. Resources are given to poor people subsidized by rich people.
Don’t kid yourself. If the major platforms could exclude those who aren’t in their advertisers demographics they wouldn’t waste a single server on them.
Maybe that's the source of the problem: "free", the assumption getting a service without paying somehow.
I'm old enough to remember a service, which added a footer into your IE5 and showed ads constantly, and in exchange, you got paid, with actual money. (Pocket money level, of course; unfortunately I can't recall service names, this was pre-2000.)
Getting a service for viewing ads - that is fine.
Telling me it's free then showing me ads - that's just plain dishonestly and/or lying, so don't tell me not to block ads: I never agreed to them explicitly.
And as for information access: Wikipedia, one of the most well known source of information, is running on donations - subscriptions, really. It is viable. Makes no money for investors though and serves and actual purpose, like a library.
