I see this over and over again. I think people see the money and the monetization inevitably degrades the quality.
I'm attempting a web 1.0 business experiment with a website targeted towards finding unique stuff in the city I live in. I've decided, as a philosophy, that there will be no comment section with people bickering to moderate, no email signup, no real database, no login, no data collection on my users (besides whatever google analytics tracks) - but I personally don't want to handle your data. I guess this is all to say, I'm going to see if I can avoid falling down this rabbit hole as the community grows - can I avoid ruining the website? I guess I'll see.
I think if you do it right you can monetize tastefully, but that formula is still a work in progress. I just have a sense its possible. I think most people just chase the money into oblivion trying to scale into huge companies mostly for ego? However, it's entirely possible to create little lifestyle businesses on the internet that bring in a decent salary, but don't scale to tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it would be fun to see the web return to a less chaotic place.
I think the web is less chaotic now. I was extremely chaotic early on, and it was great and terrible. You had niches for everything, style was all over the place, people made things efficient in interesting ways and, of course, there were scams and spam and trash and bling.
Now the web most people 'see' is fairly standardised and curated. I mean, try searching for a good forum on a specific topic now; you get wordpress/medium blogs or a link to Discord/Twitter/FB. A lot of the unique and niche 'group interests' are now within the walled gardens of Facebook (+Instagram) and Twitter or Discord, which are basically not searchable from a general search engine query. Or they're in Reddit, the uber-forum that's at least still searchable. I think that's a problem.
I think there's a subtle issue here you've almost hit by 'people just chase the money into oblivion,' and I think it's this: they don't quite understand or appreciate the value their 'product' creates and the audience it is for. So they chase 'monetisation' as its own reward - ads, dark patterns, trying to reach an ever 'broader audience.' Which becomes much easier to compete against and they lost not just customer base but loyalty and recognition.
The Present Web is Marketer / SEO / Advertiser Chaotic.
There was a high diversity of original content, much of it neither monetised nor monetisable, in the early days. It wasn't necessarily high quality, but it was different.
Today, you can find (if you look for it) quality material, but it's drowned in absolute oceans and galaxies of crap. In the relatively early days of television, Marvin Kitman observed "On the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel." The Internet does this on steroids. It's a fundamental characteristic of mass media.
I'm attempting a web 1.0 business experiment with a website targeted towards finding unique stuff in the city I live in. I've decided, as a philosophy, that there will be no comment section with people bickering to moderate, no email signup, no real database, no login, no data collection on my users (besides whatever google analytics tracks) - but I personally don't want to handle your data. I guess this is all to say, I'm going to see if I can avoid falling down this rabbit hole as the community grows - can I avoid ruining the website? I guess I'll see.
I think if you do it right you can monetize tastefully, but that formula is still a work in progress. I just have a sense its possible. I think most people just chase the money into oblivion trying to scale into huge companies mostly for ego? However, it's entirely possible to create little lifestyle businesses on the internet that bring in a decent salary, but don't scale to tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I think it would be fun to see the web return to a less chaotic place.