Re: 404 : This title does not exist.
And therein the point.
The majority of advert-plagued sites on the web are there for one reason only: to sell your eyeballs to the advertisers.
You don't see adverts on commercial sites like computer makers or washing machine makers or grocery stores or furniture stores other than for the things they are currently selling - usually directly from the store/maker in question. You don't see adverts on some sites - e.g. the BBC or NASA and no doubt others.
You see adverts on the clickbaits of this world, where the people running the sites have found a way to get people to keep coming back by offering some other service for free. The service *isn't* the raison d'etre of the site, it's just the bait - whether it's a gossip site or a news site or facebook or twitter or blog sites or porn sites. The reason the site is there is because they want to make money from advertisers. To be fair, I suspect most have tried charging and found it didn't work - or if it did, it didn't make anyone a zillionaire... and now they're starting to find that advertising wasn't quite the golden goose they thought it was.
There is no difference between a site relying on adverts (absent the commercial sites I mentioned earlier) and commercial advert-funded radio or TV - and if they can't find a way to make me and everyone else pay for the service they provide, that service will cease to exist. And for the majority of sites, that will be an issue why?
For curiosity - anyone at El Reg care to give a rough idea of the advertising income divided by the number of users in a month? A year? I bet it's in pennies a month... I did the sums on facebook a while ago and it looked under forty dollars a year.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
