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Comment by prof_hobart | Hacker News Reader

What would be paying for most of it?

An awful lot of the content out there exists because there's money in it (or at least the hope of money). And most of what pays for that is ads.

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I think you could still do ads, but they would have to "come home" to the actual site, and the site itself would be responsible for negotiating ad sales. I think this would be the best bet for small advertisers, in the long run. Yes, there's no chance that small advertisers could afford to advertise on a large site, but most small advertisers want a more-targeted site, anyways. I tried to buy super-targeted ad-space late last year, and it is nearly impossible to buy ad space directly from smaller web sites. They either a) don't do ads, or b) only use a larger ad provider. I think a lot of smaller sites are giving up a lot of ad revenue by not managing the ads themselves (regional competition vs. global competition, as one example).

Just scrolled down HN a bit:

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/adblock-plus-teams-up-with-...

Seems like one feasible solution :)

That's great in theory, but how many people would be prepared to pay even more on top of their existing internet charges to fund this?

I'm sure some would, but I also suspect most wouldn't.

There's also the question of "instead, it will automatically track their browsing activity...". That would be enough to put off a lot of people.

Contributor is good too, since it has more reach than Flattr: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

I've been using it for months now, and while it's not 100%, it's pretty nice to see cat pics instead of ads.

Bloggers. The Internet is not short of quality content at all. If Mashable can't afford to write about Trump, a blogger will.

Not with the same quality nor with the same consistency.

While there are some great bloggers that might cover this, it's usually people that are starting to do that to have an "head start" while waiting to be able to do that full time.

Most bloggers also still run ads to offset some of their costs and they usually provide commentary of news that are reported by more traditional news outlet.

Without those incentive I don't see many bloggers, especially intelligent and high quality one that will keep going or that will be able to have the system in place o handle an "internet hug" by a site like reddit or hackernews.

Then we'lll go back to watching TV, or playing smartphone games. Most publishers satisfy the problem of boredom in the office place. They don't provide anything that is critical/unique.

Publishers writing content 'for free' and trying to push ads to you is like a wealthy man throwing money off a bridge, and scolding at us for not praising him in return. We never demanded it from him, it was just thrown at us.

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