Cloudflare says humans could become a "rounding error" as bots generate 1,000 times more internet traffic

awesome, then we can remove all the ads, no? because bots don’t purchase things, no?

A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.

The only business models that have really worked online have been:

1. Ad-supported.
2. You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
3. Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.

If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.

I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability

Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.