The underlying commercial nature of the World Wide Web

In a recent blog entry about an advertising controversy on O'Reilly Media sites, Tim O'Reilly (publisher of many geek-adored books) talks about advertisers using links in ads to bump up the PageRank of their sites. While a commentator pointed out the obvious workaround is to not link directly to the advertiser's site but to go through a (non-indexed, no-PR) redirection script, underlying the controversy is a larger debate about the commercial nature of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

While I discuss this in some detail in chapter two of my book (in a section titled “Who Pays for the Web?”), the Web today is very different from what it was ten years ago. Those that advocate that the Web return to its non-commercial roots forget one thing: it costs real money to create and maintain Web sites and the associated Internet infrastructure. To quote Tim's blog entry:

Simply put, we pay O'Reilly Network contributors for content, and we pay our staff to develop and maintain the sites. The money to pay those people comes from advertisers. Readers get the content for free, and advertisers pay for the chance to get those readers' attention. It's expensive to create a quality website with original technology content… [emphasis added]

Obviously, not everyone is out on the Web to make a buck. Motivations vary from person to person, though in general I like to categorize them using one or more of the “Four F's”:

• Fame - to be held in esteem
• Fortune - to make money
• Philanthropy - to do good
• Fun - to entertain and amuse

But even if you're doing it purely for fun or philanthropy, there are still costs to incur. Someone's got to pay to for the bandwidth, for the servers, for the infrastructure. The readers these days don't want to pay for the content they're reading, but TINSTAAFL — “there is no such thing as a free lunch” (a quote commonly attributed to economist Alvin Hansen). So most sites turn to advertising. (Or pay for things out of their own pockets, of course.) Hence the demand for advertising services like AdSense. The commercial nature of the Web may offend purists, but there's not much that can be done about it now. You might as well embrace it!

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