Tell me you work for a monopolist without telling me you work for a monopolist. It's all a nice effort to alleviate yourself of blame by casting this as something "we've" done.
Also, the reason so many companies turn to ads isn't because they like ads, or don't know about all the problems that stem from having your customers not be your users. It's because users still prefer to pay with anything but money. Not all, but the vast majority. This creates inevitable incentives.
eg Don't like google? Fastmail will happily sell you an account today, and Kagi is a great substitution for the vast majority of my search needs. Go reread the recent post on here with people whining that Kagi charges though.
If your users won't pay, then perhaps, you don't have something they actually want?
The reason so many companies turn to ads is because they are exceptionally risk adverse in this economy. They'll step over a risky dollar to pick up easy nickles. This is also the outcome of the long arm of monopoly power exerting itself.
> The reason so many companies turn to ads is because they are exceptionally risk adverse in this economy.
It's really not, and the proof is it's been happening for 20 years, in boom and in recession. Read the kagi thread, even on here. People want better search. They just want it to be free and whine if you say cool, $10/mo or enjoy Google and expertsexchange / freecodecamp / w3schools / geeksforgeeks / programwiz / simplilearn / freecodecamp / endless spam filtered by you in the results.
It's the unavailable problem with b2c businesses that we discuss endlessly :shrug:
You have one example. There are tons of counter examples. Software is a multi billion dollar a year industry. I'm entirely unconvinced by the entirely anecdotal "kagi thread" case.
