Im going to be frank. I block ads, and will not start paying for content. I have had an advertising free web for a long time and will not:
a) accept ads
b) pay for content
What will you do for people like me?
What will you do for people like me?
When I'm browsing the internet, I really think that I'm wasting my time since I already pay for and therefore have quality news content. I assume that many, like me, are browsing rather than working because we have focus issues.
So here's another business model for someone to pursue. Rather than ad-block, let's have site-block but where that site that got blocked still receives a micro-payment from me. Why, you ask, would I want to pay a site that I didn't visit? Because I made an extra $20 that hour by not wasting time on the site, and I'm happy to give them $1 or 5% of those extra earnings. The fact that I'm somewhat serious here show you what a crazy game we've made for ourselves.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/AdSupportedWebD...
> essentially all of the ad supported sites I visit are diversions
The internet existed and was great before ads, it'll exist and be great if ads die off.
If I don't want to see ads from, e.g. NY Times, but I want to read their content, I could either manage yet-another-subscription, or I could have a plugin that manages the payment for me.
The benefit of the latter is (in theory) a) I don't need to have yet-another-subscription, and b) I don't pay for what I don't read.
The downside is, again, that I don't pay for what I don't read, which in turn leads to click-bait and listicles. However, advertising has already led to that.
And if everyone ad-blocking is not sustainable then there will be less for you to consume.
Rather than trying to shoehorn these 'user pays' models as an alternative to 'advertiser pays', we need a totally new paradigm.
Invent it pls SV