[jslabovitz]

I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising wall.

But I’ll tell you that the the existence of GNN itself, in 1993, was certainly not for the purpose of serving ads. Heck, as I explained, online advertising didn’t even exist at that time (besides a few misguided attempts on Usenet), so there was only conjecture that it might work at all, and lots of room to experiment.

Also, there was really no other economic revenue model accessible to us, other than sponsored content, as there were no online payment systems on the WWW of that era. Heck, there weren’t really any active websites at all — almost all sites (including GNN) were what we’d today call static sites. (As I mentioned, cookies came later, so there was also zero targeting of ads besides basic demographics of Internet users at the time.)

[lmm]

> I don’t want to argue about magazines (or newspapers) in general, since it seems you have quite a cynical view there. I’d advise that you research common standards of journalism, including the concept of the editorial/advertising wall.

My cynicism comes not from being ignorant of traditional newspapers but from having been very close to them. My experience is that people (in any industry really) may be decent, noble, and above any such influence on any conscious level, and yet they will nevertheless show an almost magical tendency to act in alignment with their economic interests, even when they seem to have reached their position on wholly unrelated grounds.