'free' ad supported products usually have engineering costs greater than compute costs, even up to billions of users.
Compute scales with the userbase. Engineering scales with the product featureset. That means a small userbase in general cannot support much engineering and therefore cannot have much complexity/features if it wants to be profitable.
That in turn puts big companies at a massive advantage. And in fact we see that - the vast majority of my time using the web is spent on big products (google, youtube, reddit, twitter), and only a small fraction on small sites (perhaps HN being the one exception here). Those big products won the battle for my attention.
Compute scales with the userbase. Engineering scales with the product featureset. That means a small userbase in general cannot support much engineering and therefore cannot have much complexity/features if it wants to be profitable.
That in turn puts big companies at a massive advantage. And in fact we see that - the vast majority of my time using the web is spent on big products (google, youtube, reddit, twitter), and only a small fraction on small sites (perhaps HN being the one exception here). Those big products won the battle for my attention.