[pwang]

Exactly. Ads are a legacy business model of a legacy distribution system. Too few people have read JPB's excellent "Selling wine without bottles", but that is in full effect here.

The problem is that new content-centric business models have not yet emerged. So, some people remain chained to the old paradigms.

The crisis we have is a gap in vision. People don't realize that driving cost of information distribution to zero means that it no longer has enough scarcity to force the economic transfer of other scarce resources. Basically, what OSS did for commercial software, the Internet did for anything that fits within a 2D screen. Netflix, NYTimes, Fortnite, JK Rowling, and Jenna Jameson are all competitors in a space whose Pixels*Seconds value is commoditized.

Capitalism doesn't thrive unless there is an exponentiating dynamic. The only one available on the Internet is bandwidth capture. Which, for now, translates into attentional capture.

With the imminent arrival of P2P web software (e.g. Beaker Browser) and mesh networking, the tides will turn back towards a creator-centric peer network.