Close, but 2000s had some very intrusive and malware ridden advertisements. Popups everywhere, aggressive banners, malware and random browser toolbars being installed to your system. Complete wild west of unrestrained advertising. Online ad blocking didn't start with Ublock Origin, the first tipping point was in the 90s and 2000s, where famously clean and effective search engine Google swooped in to "save us" with their Chrome browser blocking popups by default, and their own concept of 'ethical ads', which were mostly unobtrusive and text-based (what happened there?). Which was nice for a while before Google exploited the popularity that bought them to turn into an inescapable ad monster.

What are you talking about, ads were far worse back in the 90s /2000. Were you even using the Internet back then? Couldn't block them and things like infinite pop ups were rampant, if you didn't have a firewall setup and anti virus, your entire Windows 98 setup could be wrecked in minutes just being online

pays for own domain/no ads

There is a 0% chance you were an adult in the early 2000s lol

Imagine having ads in things but instead of just being there, they opened in new windows, were loud as fuck, and opened by the hundreds. That's what the Internet was like

Pop up blockers walked so ad blockers could run.

People seem to forget that before YouTube partnered with content creators people just kinda... uploaded stuff that they were passionate about. They didn't do it for a living and they did not expect payment but might have asked for donations if their channel was costly to run. Sure, the production value and editing quality was a lot lower, but the core experience was still the same.

This is why I flatly reject the notion that me blocking ads on YouTube hurts content creators in any meaningful way, especially now that almost all of them are partnered with some kind of sponsor embedded in the video.

I sometimes thought about opening a personal blog or something on the domain I own anyway (mostly to test Hugo).

But then again, when was the last time you read a personal blog? If you want anybody to the see your stuff you’ve got to be on instagram or something.

The weirdo content creators on Newgrounds and eBaum's World were still better than 90% of content creators that exist now.

Hell, many of those same content creators are the 10% of the not-shit YouTube creators now

People need to bring back cheesy personal websites, banners and forum signatures...

There are still some corners online where you can find and make those, even if you don't have the money, time or knowledge to host one yourself. For example:

Neocities (yes it's like Geocities)

I am obsessed with those sites. It's like the internet back in the day when I was a teen. I hope the social media and content creator sludge never overcomes it...

It's not all black and white though. People in the 2000's didn't know that you can make a living off content creation, but people who have adopted this style usually can and will (or should) turn more effort into creating high quality videos.

"Normal guy in 2000"

as someone who was into computers and in high school in 2000, that that was not normal.

even if yo mean normal computer literate person, not even then... Most people did not run their own servers, was it more common, yeah, but it wasn't a given.

Things were only free if you were into piracy, everything cost money though without as much marketing, but then it wasn't a huge market...

Also ads were everywhere and worse...

Shameless plug nx2.site (it has no ads, but also unfortunately no real content)

Shut up old man.

We made a geocities page as a group project and the teacher thought we were geniuses.

Millennials really can't handle growing up can they.