this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.