Your message is a little disjointed. Are &quot;other parts&quot; marketing or not-marketing? Take your pick.<p>Anyway, the article doesn&#x27;t discuss where ad money goes. It would need to use figures for that.<p>Instead, it tries to paint a market as some sort of a conspiracy that purposely creates complexity to steal money from consumers. It&#x27;s essentially FUD.<p>You seem to suffer from the very common bias of &quot;build it and they will come.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s irrelevant whether a cost is &quot;essential&quot; to the production of the item. Distribution is a cost that&#x27;s not part of production. Would you say that people pay a &quot;consumption tax&quot; on freight transport when they buy any physical product?<p>You say &quot;most&quot; web startups are based on advertising. That would require proof. I recall seeing someone breaking down the list of the current &quot;unicorns&quot; by revenue model. A minority is financed by advertising.