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Originally Posted by smoothmoniker
Advertising has supported the development of 300 channels of 24/7 crap on television. I think the dollars are there to sustain web-based development in the same way.
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I just don't believe advertising will scale from a few hundred channels to a few billion web pages. The days where I can place Google AdWords advertisements on my personal website and make a living are already passing, except for those who are exceedingly popular.
That said, I don't think advertising will disappear. Not an insignificant amount of advertising is placed on worthless content or content that attracts worthless eyes. It's going to take a while for businesses to figure out how to stop spending on worthless advertising (and I don't just mean 'that ad sucks' worthlessness).
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With the exception of FOSS, developers intend to make a profit.
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Many developers are paid to work on FOSS, many get personal satisfaction from contributing to the FOSS community, and many others publish software they would need or want to write anyway as FOSS (e.g., consultants often contribute to FOSS, and make their living due to FOSS).
Nobody writes code without profit. But that profit is often non-remunerative.
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If they're giving the software away for free to you, the user, what exactly did you think their business plan was? Raise funding, release software, go bankrupt?
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The problem is the companies that build software and raise funding and believe advertising will make them profitable. This does not work if you have significant infrastructure overhead. Facebook isn't profitable and they have ridiculous CPM. Kottke was profitable the last time I checked but it's an operation of one.
Anyway, back to the conversation regarding Meebo.
How long is it going to be until someone writes a greasemonkey script or a browser plugin to strip these ads out?