[xfactorial]

I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.

I believe there are two caveats on it:

1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user.

2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).

[deathanatos]

> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them.

The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?

[oneeyedpigeon]

I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.

[afferi300rina]

The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.