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Comment by eiaoa | Hacker News Reader

> How are those people on said websites (and almost any other medium) supposed to make money?

1. Have less annoying ads that respect the user.

2. Charge money.

3. Some novel funding model that's unexplored because obnoxious ads dominate everything and suck all the air out of the room.

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Let me preface this by a large percentage of people in advertising are not creating #1. BUT:

1. That's fair, but it takes time and talent to create these.

2. Clearly that isn't working; see almost any news site in existence

3. This is a hope, and a nice one. https://scroll.com/

3. OK they have a different business model and lots of content partners, but they won't tell you what it is, just invite you to sign up. I'm guessing it involves monetizing email addresses. If this content free proposition is your idea of a nice prospect, what is it based on? Anyone can say they have laudable goals, like beauty contestants who aspire to bring about world peace and end hunger. Perhaps they're just saying nice things without any real capability or intention to deliver?

you know, sometimes I wonder how the internet would look like today if every time you loaded content from a server some money would automatically go their way (a tiny payment compensating for server time of sorts)

Ah the PRESTEL / Dialcom model pay per page and or minute *narrator voice" it didn't turn out well- I should know I was there if you don believe me ask Vint Cerf

I suspect even worse. People would be less willing to try new things with an upfront cost while clickbait would be even more incentivized as they don't even have to worry about not offending advertisers.

That's similar to what https://flattr.com/ tried. (You could set it to auto-pay visited pages)

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