Count all of the web content you've consumed and all the web services you've used in the past year. Now count all the ones you've paid for.

Also, those paid-for services you mention are of such high quality (to you, not advertisers) because you pay for them. You are the customer not the product, as they say.

That isn't entirely fair. There are some websites that offer a free tier in the hopes that enough users will buy the paid tier. I suppose one could call this a form of advertising, but Dropbox giving me 2gb free does not seem to the type of manipulative advertising you are referring to (and is not a revenue source for them).

Granted. But it does't change the numbers very much. Keep counting.

You're right, and it's depressing that you're being downvoted. Then again, HN can be a very hostile place if you bring an unpopular perspective to a discussion, even if that perspective is presented with clarity of thought and reason.

Unpopular? Really? "Advertising is bad" is one of the most supported memes on HN.

Most people don't pay for Wikipedia, how are they the product?

Many people pay for Hulu and many other services, and still get ads, how are they not the product?

That cliché can't die soon enough.

It's quite representative of the problem if you can't identify the difference between Wikipedia - a non-profit which is entirely ad-free and runs exclusively on donations, compared with the majority of other free sites which are funded by subjecting their visitors to advertising. No wonder Wikipedia has so to push so hard with its annual donation drives, if people can't even recognise the benefits of keeping it free from commercialism.

Hulu is an example which mixes both approaches - clearly an $8/mo premium subscription isn't enough to support their business model, so it has to be supplemented with ads. Not sure why this needs explaining. TV is obviously an industry very tightly coupled with ads, making it more difficult to disrupt with a fully ad-free approach.

Fair enough - I thought you were claiming the cliché was generally incorrect, not that there are a few exceptions which break it. Obviously I can't argue with that. It's intended as a rule of thumb and applies to the vast majority of the internet. Especially if you count a donation-driven site like shareware software - an encouraged, but optional, request for payment.

Wikipedia is not a business, so that's irrelevant.

Hulu's just funny to me. You're paying to be a product. It means the business decision makers will respect you a little, but how much depends on how much of the revenue you're bringing in and what sort of industry it is.

The cliché is an excellent guide to the situation. So many people don't seem to understand why ad-supported businesses work they way they do, and in particular why they don't seem to have the customer's best interests in mind.

Are you just now discovering that simple heuristics don't always contain all the truth in the world? I think the rest of us generally know that, which is why we're comfortable with the notion that broad, pithy statements aren't perfectly accurate across all time and space.

Comcast is a fine example of something where you're the product even if you're paying for it. (Note that "if you're not paying for it you're the product" doesn't have anything to say about the case where you are paying.) Monopolies and oligopolies basically get to treat customers like property, because they know the customers don't have much real choice. Comcast is exactly what I had in mind when I said it depends on the industry.

It's the advertising (and selling of your eyeballs) that makes you a product. Wikipedia has no ads. To the degree that Hulu relies on ads, we are their product. Labeling it a cliché doesn't make it less true.

There's nothing wrong with free, as long as it's truly free. Ad-supported services have huge costs that we all pay for as I explain in detail in my linked comment.