Everything free, becomes ad-infested. Nothing is free, and it's really annoying seeing company after company make empty promises about privacy and "being different", then switching up when their investors start breathing down their necks. Just be honest from the start.
Yeah, they're so ubiquitous people have gotten used to them. Companies have learned that if you put ads in paid products, people grumble and moan but still keep paying for your product.
The future is ads everywhere, paid or free, doesn't matter. More revenue out of every user with little effort, shareholders love this stuff.
Agreed. Outside software, there's a growing plague as well.
- Buying an $1200+ iPhone that doesn't come with an adapter.
- BMW charging you $10+ bucks per month to turn on seat heaters that came with your already expensive car
- Mercedes 0-60mph acceleration booster "unlock fee" for $1200/year
- Tesla woes with frequent "upgrades" locked behind paywalls.
- The ironic micro-transactions in Mobile games. When summed up, they are only "macro" with millions of bucks coming in every day. This has infested gaming outside Mobile as well. I'm not ever gonna touch console gaming again.
Their secret is they did not try to grow at an insane rate. They have 50 employees and over $650 million in revenue. The revenue per employee is over $13 million.
The reason the giants are giant is because they are driven to become giant by people and investors who want to become billionaires.
I dunno if it's fair to say "just be honest from the start" -- they might have genuinely believed it but had to face the reality because they set themselves up poorly with how they raised / their finances / etc.
