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Mozilla to expand focus on advertising - "We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market" (blog.mozilla.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (19 children)

And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

I'm afraid they aren't wrong. The majority of people aren't going to pay for access to random blogs etc. So we'd end up with only the big players having usable sites.

People kick off about ads but rarely suggest an alternative to funding the internet.

Back in the day ads were targeted based on the website's target audience not the user's personal data. It works fine but is less effective. Don't see why they couldn't go that way.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Internet was fine in the early 2000s before the rise of social media platforms resulted in surveillance advertisement complex.

It was a different place, but worked ok.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sounds like you're forgetting about the dot com bubble. The internet wasn't fine abck then because nobody really had a sustainable business model.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The dot com bubble made the Internet explode, sure, but corporate sites weren't the entire internet back then. There were far more niche sites, web rings, forums, etc...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

The reason I mentioned the dot com bubble is because a lot of the companies back then failed because they couldn't figure out a sustainable business model. It was mostly hype-driven with the idea of getting users first, then figuring out monetization later.

That's why we have ad-supported sites today. It was the main business model that was the most sustainable.

There were a lot of small sites, sure, but a lot of them were hosted on services with no real business model. Even back then, not a lot of people self-hosted.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

That's a fair thing to bring up. I think your point went over my head, because I was mostly reminiscing about how the less capital-oriented parts of the internet were relatively pleasant before companies like Facebook came along and encouraged them all (with their newly acquired capital) to jump into the big centralized areas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Surveillance advertisement was already around.

Social Media platforms simply capitalized on it.

And users sucked it up for "convenience".

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