But let’s be honest, the changes to the site that have happened over the past few months are awful. Please recognize that putting ads, popups, JavaScript hell, and weird inconsistent UI design has not been for the best.
I know you got some people to try and help you monetize all this stuff you’d been doing, but it’s not a good thing for the long term. These “people” who are trying to turn this site into a T-shirt selling business are a cancer. I’m about ready to outsource all of my etymology needs to en.wiktionary.org (as dreadful a thing as that is!)
I presume that this post will be deleted and ignored, but I just wanted to set forth honestly what the average user of this site is thinking as all these changes are implemented.
Do you think a solution is less ads? no ads at all? I’m not sure if there are many alternative funding options for the etymonline team. Only thing I could think of would be selling the dictionary as a service. Some sort of API. But that seems like a long shot and not something there is much demand for.
The site is certainly being used in AI training data, if I had to bet. But as this site is a drop in the bucket compared to all the different sources in the training data, I don’t think it’s possible to carve out a revenue stream from that either.
