People still want to consume content. What is the business model for content sites? Die?
Right now it seems like people want to leach the content with out paying the bills.
Right now it seems like people want to leach the content with out paying the bills.
The main advantage of ads is that they are potentially brain-dead easy to enable profitability if you have lots of traffic. But even then that's not necessarily an objectively good thing.
Also, I wouldn't say that "people want to leach ... with out paying" is accurate whatsoever. Between merch, events, crowd funding, and patronage (patreon et al) there is a massive and rapidly growing amount of money that has been going to content creators direct from content consumers. It's easier than it's been in a long time, perhaps ever, for a creator to support themselves, aside from ads, and it's only getting easier.
But it really only hurts the small business trying to eek out a living. Small businesses will go under and what's left will be large conglomerates.
Hacker news seems to be a popular place for people that no nothing about economics and do everything in their power to willingly give up markets to the likes of large companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
The interesting part is that that then there's outrage when the above companies abuse their monopoly...when the regulations and culture that you supported created them in the first place!
http://www.pledgesociety.com/ (Patreon)
There are certainly sites that make way more than $67k per month in advertising fees.
Tipping might be one of the possible business models but it still has a long way to go.