Comment by ButlerianJihad

I did not intend to omit that, but the origin of the web was in a peer-to-peer, collaborative Internet that no longer exists.

Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.

But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.

Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.