There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web."
Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993. There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground, the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The "front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no doubt you could but the initial starting point was intellectual curiosity. This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.)
As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity. Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial (either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil.
The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete Javascript du jour.
The old Web directories had a "Business" section where everything commercial or sale-related was listed. Then sub-levels of any other section, e.g. "Music", would include a cross-reference to the same topic in the "Business" hierarchy. But the default assumption was that you were looking for non-commercial, or at most ad-supported sites.
There has always been a place for commerce and marketing on the web."
Not really true as I remember it. The web opened up to the public in 1993. There was no commerce and marketing in the beginning. Even by 1996 while commerce and marketing may have existed, e.g., Amazon founded in 1995, its place was in the background. As I rememember the early web, the foreground, the "starting point" or "portal", was something like Yahoo! You had to pick a topic (direction) that you wanted to go in. For example, if you were after music, you might end up browsing the Internet Underground Music Archive. The "front page" of the portal was predominantly non-commercial, mostly generic headings for topics. If you wanted to search out something commercial, no doubt you could but the initial starting point was intellectual curiosity. This is IMO what has been lost over time with regard to web use: intellectual curiosity and the ability to actually satisfy it. (A fun tangent here is the collections of inane queries that people type into Google. These are simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.)
As an experiment have a look at the Yahoo! page today. It is full of low quality mainstream "news". There is zero attention to intellectual curiosity. Nothing to see here, folks, but here is the latest news. For part 2 of the experiment, run a Google search for the term "music". The results are dominated by YouTube. Every result is directly or indirectly commercial (either selling something or conducting surveillance and serving ads), except one: Wikipedia. The chances of someone new to the web not following a link to YouTube or some other Google-controlled domain would seem almost nil.
The "onboarding" process for new web users is very different today than it was in the early 1990's. Perhaps it is still possible to approach the web with a sense of awe and wonder, pondering "What is out there?" However a new web user is scant likely to end up on a non-commercial website besides Wikipedia. What is out there? Surveillance, ads and an endless supply of soon-to-be-obsolete Javascript du jour.