[Rumudiez]

For being such a bunch of stingy capitalists, it's always surprising to see people defend businesses without viable models.

If hosting content online for free isn't working for you, maybe that's not a commercial space worth occupying. Not everything deserves to be paid for, "selfish" or not. Users, aka "the market," will decide if your product is usable despite the income generating parts.

Marginally related, if your business isn't profitable enough to pay your employees a livable wage, then maybe your business isn't actually profitable enough to, well, be "in business."

[always_good]

Dunno, what doesn't seem "viable" is serving ads that can be trivially blocked.

We haven't even reached the real arms race yet, and people are already talking like adblockers won.

Let's pick this convo back up at least when ad networks like Adsense let you proxy through your server, ending an entire class of adblocking at once. And that's not the end of the low-hanging fruit.

[icebraining]

Adblockers have blocked first-party ads forever. They just use other methods to recognize them, rather than the origin URL.

[ue_]

>For being such a bunch of stingy capitalists, it's always surprising to see people defend businesses without viable models.

Perhaps I don't do it personally because I'm a Communist.