this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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Are advertisers absolutely necessary?
Advertisers are essentially subsidizing many businesses. Costs are higher than you think and most products we enjoy are expensive.
Yes, there is FOSS, but you’re essentially fucking lucky that people that work on those want to do this from the passion they have. Most people don’t, and won’t, do shit like that for free. Hell, look at many here on the internet that want products for free and are unwilling to pay or even do minimal donations for things that they already like.
Like it or not, most people want to be fucking paid for their time and FOSS, as great as it can be, is not the norm for most talent. We can make counter arguments and hate on capitalism, but that is the reality, and until entire cultures change then this is what it is and advertisers are sort of necessary evil in most cases.
Lots of FOSS developers are paid by companies. At least people working on the major projects.
My question is whether websites need to be owned by businesses.
No but the end of internet advertising will basically be the end of many internet professions that are already struggling. Like writers and editors. So only hobbyists and the lucky few who have enough fame to get paid via Patreon will be making certain websites.
Tbf that's how it was a couple decades ago. Also, writers and editors aren't internet professions. They can go back to newspapers.
Even all those websites that are serving content illegally, like porn and game pirating sites, only stay up because of advertising.
It can't cost that much to host a piracy website. Worst case scenario, we go to Telegram.
Few online platforms flourish without advertisers. Practically all our content on lemmy comes from sites with advertising.
well, i've posted quite a lot of original memes here.
and thank you for your service!
I'm sure people would create content even if they didn't make anything. They did in the past.
mmhmm, give us your top 10 Peertube reccomendations :)
Top 5 recommendations uploaded on YouTube before monetization:
I just tried to sign up for Peertube because this comment reminded me
The only site with any videos on it (Fediverse.TV) doesn't allow signups. Neither does the default instance (Peertube.TV).
Tragically, Web3 cryptoshit MAHA platform "Odyssey" was much more functional when I tried to use it, before realizing what kind of content dominated there.
EDIT: Finally found one that let me create an account:
...So even with an account, I can't upload videos?
you can, there are hundreds of nodes. to be fair there are probably 10's of thousands of videos, but ... they're almost all poor quality or just uninteresting
If all my time there i've found a couple music channels and a couple of linux people. There's no money in it, so none of the creators put any real time into anything over there.
There's tons of creators on YouTube who post content without receiving any money just for the joy of the game.
Maybe advertisers are bots too?
Yes because people are cheap.
Not necessarily. Sometimes people just can't afford to pay websites.
Literally everything on the internet is paid for by advertising. And without it every site you rely upon will either become a subscription service or simply disappear because it is expensive to run a website.
Why is it so expensive to run a website?
Scale.
Running a website is very cheap, like $5 a month
Running a huge website with millions of users is expensive
it depends a lot on the website
1 user on peertube consumes more bandwidth than 100 users on lemmy
Also salaries. Like the people who make the content also need to get paid.
Because bandwidth isn't free.
Server hosting - is my understanding. It takes a lot of resources to host a site.