I agree generally, but I was under the impression they had explicitly committed to ads over other revenue forms much earlier. Importantly, there was a point in Google's history where they weren't committed to this, and the internet would look a lot different had they not just assumed ads would be sufficient from the start.

Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down. I didn't even know it existed until after it was gone, frustratingly. I thought it was a neat way to allow the industry bridge to other funding models.

(Or perhaps such a business model relies on tracking that's been deemed invasive. Who knows.)

> Curiously, they had a solution of sorts in a program where you could basically bid for your own ad buys to remove ads from pages. For some reason they shuttered this program down.

Because in reality this is just an opt in donation to Google. It's always cheaper to just block ads entirely.

Agreed.