This is the post hoc fallacy though isn&#x27;t it? It also neglects the many ways that advertising on the internet caused a LOT of serious problems, especially in the early days around the first dot-com bust.<p>For some reason you seem to fall into the trap of thinking that ads vs &quot;begging&quot; are the only options, though that&#x27;s not going to be true, isn&#x27;t true now, and hasn&#x27;t been true for literally decades. There are tons of ways to make money with a non-paywalled content site on the internet, as witnessed by... the many ways that people have been making money on such things for going on two decades.