It just needs an incentive to have others host your content, AKA FileCoin. You've always gotta pay a little bit to keep your sites up.

That does however essentially reverse the cost of operations.

Popular content is free to host while content that isn't popular is costly to host.

The more unpopular your content the higher the cost becomes.

I'm not sure if I follow. This is from Sia, so it might not be the case with IPFS + FileCoin, but the cost for finding a host is the same for everyone. The hosts themselves determine their own price, and they're given a rating determined by the amount of storage they have + uptime + bandwidth. Users can then choose who hosts their content by looking at their rating versus cost.

Currently, without monetization in place, popular content is easy to host while unpopular content is not. Monetization levels the playing field.

On IPFS popular content is cached, a website like youtube will most likely not have to pay hosting for any parts of it's website or popular videos if they were to run on IPFS.

Content that is not popular enough to remain in the IPFS caches will require filecoin or some other form of paid hosting to keep it around, thusly increased cost.

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, popular sites could probably get away with having no hosts, except for their older posts + user-generated content.

I think it's worse than that, there needs to be an incentive for businesses to own and support it for non-enthusiasts.

How could Apple or Google or Amazon or Facebook make money by promoting a distributed internet?

> How could Apple or Google or Amazon or Facebook make money by promoting a distributed internet?

Perhaps unprofitability is a feature, not a bug.

Individuals can choose to seed content they care about (given an effective UI), which means the content will be available as long as enough people care about it. “Enough” does need to be a sufficiently small number.

I disagree. I don't want a large company controlling most of the IPFS nodes.