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> It was free before the insane amount of advertising.

It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

> It was better before the insane amount of advertising.

There was anything on it really before that. Wikipedia didn't start until 2001 and there were already pop-ups and banner ads everywhere. t was better before the insane amount of advertising. I seem to recall GeoCities having ads everywhere.

In the beginning there was no ads, but they got pretty aggressive at the end (1999ish)

Geocities is an interesting case. It didn't start with ads and they monitored sites and told people to remove them (I received one such email). It wasn't out of some altruistic ideals though. They just didn't want anyone to advertise before they got their ads running on everyone's sites.

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