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Re:How do free services on the web make money? by jmillikin on Wednesday March 06, 2013 @11:13PM (#5336029)

  > you don't seem to think your site falls into the "if
  > you're not paying for it, you're the product" bucket.
  > [...]
  > People aren't paying for your product, and so you are
  > making money by serving them ads. By the nature of it,
  > any ad-supported site falls into that bucket. You require
  > more user impressions/eye balls and that is what you are
  > "selling" to advertisers/Google. This is not inherently
  > evil, and I don't think one needs to prey on their users
  > to leverage advertising.
Saying that users are "the product" implies a predatory relationship. Predatory relationships are considered evil (or at minimum extremely undesirable) when the prey are human beings.

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