I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.
Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.
Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.
And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.
Many of us liked the Internet in 1996 ;) And some saw its commercialization as an affront, as a violation of fundamental principles. So anyway, I'm not at all attached to the Internet existing in it's current form.
In general I agree with you. Technically though, youtube didn't have any revenue source initially, including ads. Basically they built a giant user base, then let someone else figure out how to make money with it (unsurprisingly, with ads).
I'm not sure how you "don't buy it". It's like not buying the fact that the moon orbits the earth.
Granted, yes, there is poor content, spammy content, copyright theft, and everything in between, but that doesn't mean all the original and good content vanishes or gets nullified. It's not a zero sum game and it's not black and white. People create content and then many (if not most) hope to monetize that content somehow. The most common form of monetization is ads. Whether it's some guy's physics blog on wordpress, or someone reporting the death of a celebrity on TMZ, all that content relies on paid advertisements.
Without ways to monetize content, the internet simply wouldn't exist in its current form. I don't even know how there is a discussion on this. Sites like youtube wouldn't exist or would be incredibly tiny because what good is hosting all that video content, paying for all that bandwidth, if you can't show some ads and make some money? If you can't make money, you can't pay your hosting bill. And a subscription service just wouldn't work - if youtube tried that originally instead of ads, I doubt most of us would have even heard of youtube in this alternate ad-free reality.
And that's my point. Ads drive the internet. Without ads, the internet would probably still look like it did in 1996. Because without all that TMZ, fantasy football and facebook content, the large majority of the masses wouldn't have dove in head first. If you don't have content, you don't have users. If you don't have users, you don't have innovation. No innovation, no current internet.