LogFAQs > #953295213

blu posted...

It was nice when things were free and done for fun and justification of personality and connection than monetization.

This was almost never an actual thing. There were always costs involved with producing and posting content online (server costs and bandwidth aren't free and never were, no matter what you thought when you were a kid and the Internet was a strange and wonderful place to you), and there were always ways to monetize views to pay those costs. Even "free" sites like GeoCities were built on an ad model.

It's just gotten more blatant these days because people have realized that most forms of Internet advertising (like pop-up ads and banner ads) don't actually convert to business for the advertisers (especially when most of the tech savvy users just block them in some way), so the methods of monetization have had to become more blatant to cope. Especially as people demand more and more content hours, with better and better production values, which in turn dramatically increases the cost to produce any meaningful content on a regular basis.

Unless you're willing to outright pay content producers to produce their content for you directly, you're implicitly accepting the idea that they need to advertise, sell merch, or generate revenue in some way because they're also human beings who need to eat and pay rent.

There are certainly still people out there who shoot a video on their phone with friends and just throw it up on the Internet with no real expectation of making money off it, and only doing it for fun. There's also a reason why you almost never find those videos.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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