Advertisements seemed to be the way until recently, where it doesn’t seem like advertising is at all a valid way to make money.
Crypto mining, while good tech, was abused far too much to where any ethical solutions made are just going to be tacked into the same category as the unethical ones.
Subscriptions are popping up a lot more, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to do things.
Donations seems like a valid way, but that relies on people actually caring enough to find something.
For the sake of discussion, let’s talk about smaller websites/businesses as opposed to huge companies like The Hard R, Amazon, etc…
How do you think the web should be monetized?
Personally? I don’t think there will ever be a way to monetize it without any downsides to whatever funding model you picked.
When I grew up, the web was composed of a lot of passion projects such as fansites, programming blogs, and of course, porn ;) Lots of people hosted these on their little baby home servers. There was a vast diversity of websites that you could find and discover. I’m hoping with big tech cratering due to enshittification, it will go back to that, but I’m not optimistic.