Not having monetization certainly leads to quirky, genuine, and campy stuff, and having easy monetization certainly leads to crap. But having monetization has also lead to some amazing content and free services today that we never had before and probably never would have had.

Things like photopea.com which is created by one person would probably have never progressed beyond the very basics were there no ad revenue to be made.

Additionally, there are countless bloggers and content creators that create rich, amazing content and there is no way they would be able to do anything close to what they are doing if they couldn't make a living at it.

Advertising partnerships were always possible with good content creators.

I posit that the ability for even the lowest level of content creators to make a few pennies hawking their crap is what has lead to the downfall of the greatness that was the early web.

In those days, everybody who was anybody had its own star trek fansite, where you could download midi files and gifs of rotating 3d klingon logos.

I miss those pixelated, homemade icons!

Now if you want a GIF, you have to pick one from GIPHY, a Facebook owned company.

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