I started researching this to prove these platforms are unfair. What I found is more nuanced. It comes down to one X factor: your audience, and what owning it is worth. Plug in your numbers and judge for yourself.
Figures come from each platform's own fee pages and published studies, gathered with help from AI research tools. Fees change — please verify before you rely on them.
In August 2026 the ten most-visited websites logged an estimated 162 billion visits. Alphabet's two alone took 117 billion. Five of the ten are social platforms. And one of them, ChatGPT, launched in late 2022.
Monthly visits, August 2026. Similarweb estimates.
Platform fees come from each platform's own pricing pages. Ad spend and earnings benchmarks come from the studies cited. Commerce rows use US pricing, include card processing and assume a $50 order.
A lower percentage isn't automatically more money. What the percentage doesn't show is what each platform brings you — the sections below put a number on that.
YouTube pays creators 55% of the ad revenue a long-form video earns. Hosting video yourself costs bandwidth for every minute watched — and you'd have to sell the ads yourself.
Marketplaces collect and remit sales tax where marketplace-facilitator laws apply, and bring buyers you'd never find. Your own store keeps more of each sale — but only of the sales that actually come with you.
Already counted in every self-hosted number above. Renewal prices, not promos.
At the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, Tim Berners-Lee sat at a computer in the middle of the stadium and sent four words that lit up the crowd: "This is for everyone." The web he built was a level field. Your site, your audience, everything it earned.
"The web is being hijacked from an ‘intention economy’ to an ‘attention economy.’"
Tim Berners-Lee, Harvard Book Store talk, October 2025, on tour for his book This Is for Everyone
The giants won on two things: they were easier to set up, and they brought the visitors. AI has slashed the first. Building a site, store or channel now takes days, not a dev team. Running one is still work.
The second is already moving. Half of US adults now use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024, and 42% use them to look things up. Google is folding AI answers into its own search. And in January 2026 it launched an open standard, the Universal Commerce Protocol, for AI agents to check out directly with merchants that adopt it, starting inside Google's own AI Mode and Gemini.
Now take the next step. An AI company, or an open-source project, builds a shared index of video, products and writing. You submit your link; it does the finding. AI becomes the hub, the search engine and the bringer of eyeballs. The audience still arrives. It just lands on your site.
It could go the other way. Pew found people clicked a regular result on 8% of Google visits that showed an AI summary, versus 15% without one. AI can become a new gatekeeper that answers without sending the visit. This only works if discovery keeps a road back to independent sites.
Berners-Lee sketched this in a 1998 design note he called the fractal web: the same structure at every scale, from one person's site to the giants. If discovery moves to AI and AI points to you, every break-even number on this page moves. That's my bet. Not if. When.
Checked October 9–10, 2026, with help from AI research tools. Fees change — verify before you rely on them.
Social pays least
per view
Social apps have the biggest audiences — and pay creators the least for bringing them. They don't charge you for hosting. They sell reach. That's the part AI could change. (This is native per-view pay only — sponsorships, affiliate and subscriptions are separate.)