[pmontra]

Software is not only web sites/applications. In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations. Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.

[oblio]

Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites?

There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).

What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?

[simias]

Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.

Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.

[oblio]

Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.

We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.