If someone is selling apples in exchange for punching me in the face (and actually watching me and doing that while I eat, for a more accurate analogy :), then I wouldn't like going to their store. I would prefer going to the farmers' market and buying directly from the farmer by paying for it with cash. Farm-to-table type of transaction. Would this make the farmer as rich as selling their apples to the face-punching store? Probably not. They would probably have to work harder for less money, because they would have to manage more of their business themselves, and their products wouldn't reach as many people. There would probably be less apple farmers overall as well. But would it be a more consumer-friendly business that is actually incentivized to put care in their product? Absolutely.

It's not my fault that there aren't more farmers' market equivalents on the web. I'll use them if/when they exist, but in the meantime I'll have to resort to acquiring my apples in alternative ways.

"Allowing" people to upload, "for free", content for YouTube to monetize is "very generous" of YouTube?!? I think you've got that severely bass-ackwards.

I'm well aware of that. Advertising is clearly the most profitable online business model. It has a low barrier of entry for users, it scales with the amount of users, and is simple to implement. Companies can collect user data and use it in perpetuity to monetize it in infinite ways beyond just ad impressions. Data is gold.

My point is that it's all corrupt to the core. It's driven by generating wealth for companies over anything else, least of all the well-being of people. It actually relies on manipulating the human psyche, pioneered by the machiavellian mind of Edward Bernays nearly a century ago. It inserts itself as a leech between the goods producer and people, to not only connect producers with interested consumers as its proponents would like us to believe, but to create consumers out of people who wouldn't otherwise be interested. And then the internet came along, and made it more profitable than it's ever been. Oh, and it's also being exploited to spread propaganda, influence elections and topple democracies, but no matter, the charts must go up and to the right.

So, yeah, sorry for the rant, but my point is that there are plenty of ways that companies can monetize their business that doesn't involve advertising. It might not be as easy or profitable, but I have this silly opinion that the well-being of society should be higher priority than generating wealth for shareholders.