Because maintaining web sites and services cost money. And making money on the web is still non-trivial. That’s because the only way to make money is either by the subscription model or by the add revenue model. Since nobody likes to pay for many subscriptions in parallel, the add revenue model is the dominating one.
If there was an easy micro-payment solution on the web this could make it more accessible and enjoyable again. This what the web3 movement is all about: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-web3.
With in-browser cryptographic wallets like Metamask, Ethereum‘s proposed token economy and the current generation of „Dapps“ we got quite a bit closer to that vision. Web3 has the added benefit to eradicate the need for password managers because your public key becomes your identity.
It may make sense in the short term, but in the long term these websites are losing customers, ie money. Online advertising is a failed business model. All those companies that started like this and succeeded quickly realized this and are constantly trying to pivot or have done so already.
I'd say the main reason for the crap web we have nowadays is: lazy people trying to get rich quick. There's nothing wrong with wanting to make money online, like people selling books, educational courses, retail in general.
What pisses me off are people who want it quick and with no work. There are literally millions of people who think that they can just throw together a website (read shopify account), enable drop-shipping through some magic shitty plugin they neither know or care anything about, and suddenly bags of money will descend upon them while they're drinking coffee, eating poached eggs at some hipster coffee shop, and posting trash on any of the grams. This fails of course and some give up while others resort to scams. This is where scummy marketing people shine. They "run the numbers" and decide to buy some bullshit fivver SEO service that litters the shit out of some keywords or engage in some other so dark of patterns that make those million-and-one cookie consent boxes seem innocent. Now take this and multiply it by hundreds of thousands of people over the last decade and a half (probably even more) who are stuck in a loop of seeing some bullshit "success story" on facebook of some random dude who's now a millionaire from selling wallets from china, wanting to do the same but are lazy and know nothing about any of the fields involved, try to scam, mostly failing, and repeat.
Nothing on the internet is free and has never been. If it appears free that's because somebody pays for it with time, money, hardware, or lost opportunities.
Probably, because several factors have conflated and reinforce each other:
1) Historically, everything on the web used to be "free" and this is still an implicit assumption for internet users.
2) Payments are not part of the HTTP protocol; micropayments never materialized
3) The web is too good for advertisers - targeting, reach, scalability are unmatched compared to off-line advertisement. This supports p.1 above and hinders p.2.
idk, back in the day ISPs offered FTP servers so that customers could launch and run their own sites. The internet was marketed as a consumption + creation tool. It's now slanted almost entirely to the former.
VC-backed companies like Buzzfeed have made serious ad money peddling the lowest-brow "content" possible (excl. Buzzfeed News, which came later). They in turn attracted numerous entrants like Vox, Mic.com and a bunch of others. Together they've compiled quite the SEO landfill.
At most companies? No. The vast majority of data siphoned isn't being actioned upon by most systems. The more mature data driven organizations will have multiple teams between data and marketing to ensure it is business ready which is code for getting rid of the shit data.
