Then start a search engine and ask people to pay per query.

mbrock · on March 6, 2016

Do you mean to imply that all forms of content are equally sensible as units of sale?

TheLogothete · on March 6, 2016

I imply that the marketplace will never allow you to charge money for something which can be given for free and monetized with ads.

mbrock · on March 6, 2016

Yeah, I would more or less agree with "people in general don't want to pay for content that they can easily and legally get for free with non-obtrusive ads."

peteretep · on March 6, 2016

Odd that Fastmail have a market, given Gmail, then

TheLogothete · on March 6, 2016

If I think really hard, I can find one exception to every rule.

chongli · on March 6, 2016

Why would we need to do that? If Google (and all of its advertising-based competitors) disappeared tomorrow, something like YaCy[0] would take over. So many business models that exist today based on advertising and central hosting could be replaced by decentralized, peer-to-peer, free software projects. The main thing limiting these projects right now is lack of interest due to the non-profit property.

[0] http://yacy.net/en/index.html