Man are you thick or what? I'm trying to tell you no sites exist unless they have ads? Where have I said that?
YOU clearly said "There's an abundance of quality free content out there already, with no expectation of payment or silly intrusive adverts." Ad revenue OR other methods of monetisation. Then when asked to name some you come back with FORUMS and BLOGS? LOL
You're being clearly disingenuous now. That was one of a string of possibilities and there are many more besides. The fact you're resorting to ad hominem retorts shows how 'strong' your argument is. I asked you what would happen if ads were banned and your only useful examples are Facebook, Google and MSN etc - which I don't and wouldn't use anyway! In fact there's a strong moral and legal argument that they ought to be shut down in their present forms anyway - especially Facebook.
Well they were your only examples, unless we count the couple of examples you gave that were factually incorrect anyway, and are already behind a paywall with no ads.
There are volumes of information out there on coding, operating systems, networking, and related fields all for the taking, on pages set up by enthusiasts (most of whom do it for a day job besides).
No ads, no bull, just people sharing their interest and knowledge for free. Just look at the volume and quality of information shared in the computing world, especially the open source world. The same can be said for every field in existence, pretty much. As I said, no payments or ads required. You keep on moving the goal posts. What exactly is your point?
My point is clear. The internet doesn't need advertising to survive or be useful. Advertising is a scourge, and fuelled by immorality, illegality and intrusion of privacy (not to mention with the odd bit of malware thrown in for good measure). The internet outside of advertising is alive and well, and we'd all be better off if it was banned tomorrow. I use an ad blocker and don't give two hoots. You response was that it's theft and if people kept doing that they'd have to pay to use services instead. I said well who cares? I already do pay. I pay for social networking (ad and tracker free) to avoid the cesspit of tracking and deceipt that is Facebook. I pay for email because I don't want my inbox to be read by others and made available to advertisers. I pay for websites so I can help keep them alive and not have to see the nonsense the 'adtech' industry puts out.
Your only retorts are that I'm clearly thick, and that there are no good resources or sites online that don't have a 'monetisation strategy' and/or adverts. Bonkers. You started on about ads, now it's broadened to 'monetisation strategies' in general. As I said in my first post and I'm saying again - they want money? Great! If they're good enough, I and others will pay. They shouldn't use advertising and I never ever see one online anyway. Just as it should be.
Edit: Thinking on, you said 'FORUMS and BLOGS lol' like it was some kind of ****show. If you put down the kitten posts and hentai long enough, there are some exceedingly valuable blogs out there. It's not all teen angst and porn you know? NASA folks, engineers, physicists, medical researchers, people who write operating systems for a living - the list is endless. Just last week I learnt an absolute tonne on a "BLOG lol!" of a guy who writes the networking stack for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Right the way down from beginner intro to kernel networking stack integration and driver queues context switching from user space to kernel space and back. It culminated with a published, peer reviewed, ten or so page academic journal article on the very same... and enabled me to finish building and coding my edge router for our network (from scratch). This same guy charges thousands to share this knowledge by day in his official job, but shares it freely on the internet (with no ads or pay wall in sight) as part of his hobby at night. But hey... blogs! LOL!
Turn this around - say advertising is banned tomorrow (yay). What do we (the public, not you the advertiser) lose?
