The internet's hatred of advertising has caused a perverse tech economy, where your company value is not tied to the your revenue, but your potential revenue given specific conditions.
Uber, the company, currently has more debt than Syria, the country.
It is not profitable, but as it might be, we allow it to continue racking up debt.
How is this an advertising problem? Because these companies used to use advertising to subsidise their growth and create products like these.
Now you need high capital investment and high debts to start. The business model is continuous investment, and then death, or *some alternatives*.
Anyway, this just annoys me whenever I see "If you can't survive without advertising, your business model sucks", because it just ends up supporting nepotism, or strangling other businesses with less money.
We need better advertising, stronger advertising regulations, controls, guidelines. We need high quality advertising that the web would allow.
Just, not this.
You can pull a Facebook, and sell user-information or tech, and advertise natively.
They're profitable, so this is clearly not a bad solution.
You can advertise natively, but not get enough user information - Twitter. Unprofitable, so maybe not.
Or you can block all content from users until they pay, which means you need a userbase. So you accept X years of debt, then you charge users and become profitable. (The Times managed this well!)
But mostly this fails, because other companies will hold out longer, or other companies will spring up in the meantime.
But new companies without investment cannot do this. Which just becomes a new nepotism.