[johnward]

Hosting is basically a commodity now but there is still cost involved. Especially if you are actually producing unique content. If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

Look, I'm not arguing that advertising is the only way to make money. In fact I think it's ultimately going to die or come to some form users and content producers can agree on. Especially with companies like Apple, and Google (who ironically makes a ton of money on ads) turning against ads. There are certain types of advertising that users do accept right now. Mostly things like "content marketing". Where a user reads some blog post or helpful tip which is really just a way to promote another service or product that the user pays for. Those even do well on HN. Then again HN is basically an advertisement in itself for Y Combinator startup news.

I do think the ability to make money helped the web grow and continue to grow. Advertising is and was a large part of that.

[baddox]

> If I choose to steal a physical product is that an "obvious flaw in the business model" too?

If you give away a physical product, with an implicit expectation that each recipient will take part in some other interaction that will give you a small amount of money, then that is an obvious flaw in the business model.

If you want to apply your analogy of theft, then you need to discuss password-protected web content where people pay for subscriptions. In that case, if someone hacks your site or steals another subscriber's password, then your analogy would hold.