TV shows are also monetized by ads, but we don't ask talented show writers why they are wasting their time writing episodes when they could be spending their efforts towards creating better ads for washing up detergent.

If the developer of Photopea went to work on advert technology what would happen? The world would loose this great piece of software, one of the worlds richest advertising companies might get imperceptibly better at targeting ads, and the creator has to stop working on his own pet project which he is doing on his own terms and work on whatever his boss tells him to. Besides, if he achieves his goal of becoming one of the most popular image editors in the world, there is a good chance Photopea will be much more valuable than he will have earned as a salary at FAANG.

No. Making use of ads to support your creation is much different than being paid to work on ad technology itself.

Ad technology is what enables products like Photopea to exist in the first place.

Photopea could just as well be monetized by selling licenses or by non-intrusive unpersonalized ads. When you have a great product making money from it isn't hard.

I think that 90% of ad tech is useless shit technology that just exists to take a cut of the money, without actually providing much of a value to anyone.

It's like realtors or financial advisors or other middlemen like that. The main reason for them being there is that it's a very profitable business to get a cut of somebody else's transactions.

People were making things before advertisers tried to pretend nothing else could exist without them, and will continue to do so long after advertisers are gone.

> long after advertisers are gone

May have sounded nice, but successful creators eventually become advertisers. As long as they have money to spend on marketing, they'll spend it to get in front of the right people

ad technology admittedly provides a possibility for monetization, which can justify something to an accountant, but it is completely perpendicular to use-value and technical feasibility. it does not "enable" anything to exist.

I don't use Photopea enough to justify paying for it. I already own Photoshop and only very occasionally fire up Photopea when I need to make a trivial edit to an image for posting online, or suchlike when I can't be arsed waiting for Photoshop to launch.

And, since I have an almost pathological hatred of adverts, I block them and use Stylebot to remove the space where they'd be.

But I'm glad the dev is making a decent living from what I've previously described as probably the most impressive web app I've ever seen. He deserves rewarded for his work but I'm sorry, I'm NEVER even looking at --never mind 'clicking on'-- a single advert while using the web, if I can possibly help it.

Since he has a paid version that doesn't seem to make much money, my guess is that he is not making that much from ads. Probably just enough for me.