> They definitely were a thing all the way back to the first browsers.

I am not disputing that ads were a thing. I am not disputing that ads were common.

I said that there were a lot of sites that chose not to run them.

> They all wish they had the viewership for ads.

This is just not true. Like, c'mon man, the very site you're on right now takes this approach.

I had ads on one of my sites in the later 90's that drew a fair amount of traffic... it technically was enough to pay for the hosting, but in the end it wasn't making enough money for it to be real income. I removed it just because I wanted to give a better experience.

Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod and the like all had banner ads. I think you could pay not to have them but for free accounts they were mandatory.

That wasn't the case in the beginning, on Geocities at least. It was a pretty big deal when they started introducing popups and mandatory banner ads.

Yes, I had some pages on geocities around 1996/97 and to the best of my memory they had no ads. I must have stopped using the site entirely by the point they got added.

edit: Wikipedia claims that happened in May 1997.

That's exactly right. They were REALLY chill in the early days: "The only code that we require to be on all of your html pages is a reference back to GeoCities. This can be a reference to the main Neighborhood page that you reside in, or to the GeoCities Home Page. Please see the FTP Procedures Page for the preferred source code." from https://web.archive.org/web/19961220170537/http://www.geocit...

The other rules are actually pretty cool, too. Zero commercial use allowed. This probably singlehandedly ensured the most diverse and interesting content.

And in order to find those neighbors in my neighborhood, we started web rings... Sites I liked were added to mine. My friends added me to theirs. Next thing you know we have curated journeys through web design - graphics - music - literature - art - trade skills - DIY - and well... let's just say they like four channels.