Even in that case,there are Firefox extensions to change your user agent. Suddenly the app requesting Chrome/Edge works perfectly, even though we are running in Firefox.
High quality speech recognition is ubiquitous in phone services these days so that isn't a good reason. Besides, if I want to set a 16 char password and am willing to enter that on a keypad, what's the problem?
Netflix (and other similar platforms), Amazon Prime, Twitch subscriptions.
Those are only 3 examples a ton of people pay for.
If you provide a good service, you will get subscribers. News have been available for free for decades thanks to OTA TV broadcasts. That's why people don't pay for it.
Niche journalism needs to have subscriptions since they can have way less views and people looking for news on that niche are ready to pay.
Flappy Bird didn’t make money from selling the app though. The example actually hurts your argument. Flappy Bird and many sites make money the same way - ads.
What makes you (and others) think that citing three (or even half a dozen) examples constitutes some kind of refutation of the general rule?
There are somewhere over a billion web sites, dude. The number of those that are profitable with a subscription model (as opposed to being supported by advertising, or not being profitable at all) is a rounding error -- in the fourth or fifth decimal place.
Not sure if it was just in my part of the world, but when Dropbox started, people only paid for local storage. And that was mostly technical people outside of small USB drives.
Ex : I call my bank and I have to go through a menu leading me to the right agent. Eventually, it asks for my password over the phone that I need to type using the 10 numbers on a phone dial.
For that i have separate numeric only password in my bank which is different than my web login password. So bank is saving couple of bucks to reuse same weak password that can be stolen on web and then used by attacker to authenticate as me over the phone. What a crappy bank.
I am just happy that bank that I use is having all set better.
What if it's actually an improvement in search results?
Everyone will search for something with a different set of words based on their experience. If most of those sets of words, all used to search for the same topic in the end, return the same results, isn't it an improvement?
Unfortunately, as you said, it doesn't help when trying to tweak the results you see to find your answer, but most people probably don't search in depth to find THE answer, but are looking for AN answer.
