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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

The era of the (non-promotion/"lifecycle"-oriented) email newsletter is dead. But, such content is still produced! In order to avoid the devaluation of text (that is, the process where people stopped reading the good newsletters because they blended into the bad newsletters), the creators of worthwhile broadcast-style media have had to move to audio or video production. Those "newsletters" are now podcasts and Youtube channels.

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There was nothing wrong with letting commerce do their thing on the internet I suppose but since there was never a non-ad driven competitor to Google non-ad driven businesses now have a hard time succeeding, which is a shame I think.

Before ad-driven internet business, remember what we had? I do very well. It was called non-profitable business. Are we that plain and narrow-minded that we therefore cannot have non-ad driven business on the web today?

The information you leak when you use ad-driven services, that's the product. I know of tons and tons of other type of products that could be driving an internet business where the product was something else entirely. But I don't see them around so much. Most buy in to the Google ad circus.

What is a "non-profitable business" and why would anyone want that? Unless you truly are talking about registered non-profits (as in charities) and are expecting a Google like organization run that way?

I was refering to the giganting corporations that were created during the dotcom era that investors threw money at but never became profitable.

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