[jerf]

It's more profound than that; as I've pointed out on HN a few times, despite what you may think, advertisers don't make that much from you. The problem with the whole "pay people to watch ads" or "share the ad profits with people" plan is that there isn't anywhere near enough money in advertising to make it worth while. We're collectively selling out our social media for an outrage factory, our entire news industry for clickbait, our privacy for everything we do online, and all the second-order effects of all that and more for on the order of $50/year. I worked out the numbers for Facebook once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19459604#19462402

Aggregated across all of humanity it's worth it to spending millions of dollars to pick up a few more fractions of a penny per person, but if you try to "share the wealth" it just isn't nearly enough.

[kyuudou]

Perhaps such platforms aren't necessarily about selling advertising. Gold mine for big data analytics though!

[jerf]

The numbers I made come from basic division on the money made by Facebook. No matter how they make it, unless they're completely hiding it from Wall Street, my numbers account for it.