There was/is a game called Shattered Galaxy that was best described this way.
Several factions continuously battling over discrete territories. There would be calculations throughout the day that would give certain bonuses to whichever factions were winning.
Every territory had a field commander that could request people join that had leveled up certain types of units based on how the battle was evolving.
There was also a form of player controlled government in each faction that could choose bonuses and allocate resources to various battles.
They provide value to the company providing the content. Many great sites are only possible thanks to advertising revenues. The world would be objectively worse-off if everyone used adblock.
How do you factor in possible technological advancements that could render a company's business model obsolete?
For example, if someone develops a distributed web-of-trust/payment platform, a lot of the value of Uber and Airbnb goes away.
The basic model behind some of these sharing companies can be factored out into (network effects + domain knowledge + web of trust) = profitable monopoly. You can adjust how valuable you consider each of these, but to me it seems like most of the value isn't in the domain knowledge area. What if someone figures out a way to not have all of the value captured by a monolithic entity?
What are your thoughts on advertising as _the_ way to make great services available for free (Google, reddit, Facebook, Stack Overflow)? What problems do you see with this model? When should this be preferred? Does it only work for massive sites?
Several factions continuously battling over discrete territories. There would be calculations throughout the day that would give certain bonuses to whichever factions were winning.
Every territory had a field commander that could request people join that had leveled up certain types of units based on how the battle was evolving.
There was also a form of player controlled government in each faction that could choose bonuses and allocate resources to various battles.
It was really cool for its moment in time.