This would be great if sites you could pay for actually exited. Ad ran sites monopolized the internet.

The argument for me is "I can pay for content with money. It can be zero money or nonzero money but I want to pay with money."

> Otherwise, the argument seems to be a case of "I don't like the way you got money/attention out of me", or "I want someone else to pay for the content I consume".

You are consuming content from me this very moment, I charge you zero dollars for it. Believe it or not, the web actually was like that at some point: not connecting producers to consumers but connecting human beings, who could produce or consume as they pleased. This was before the people with things to sell arrived.

Sure, and thats fair enough. I support a youtuber on patreon for quite a bit more than my share of ad-revenue. His patreons may be a very low percentage of his overall viewers, but even that low-percentage pays more than ad-revenue of all of them

And the beautiful thing about the internet is that you have the control over your own hardware to do something like this. You’re entitled to click, not click, delete, block whatever element on whatever website you want.

I think that would be more valid if paid versions could actually be relied upon to not track or advertise as opposed to being complete greedy morons who think "People willing to pay to not be advertised to? That must be a valueable target to market to!". I seriously wish that was just a strawman.

As long as "merchants" have the option of claiming both it undermines the idea of paying as an alternative which also undermines the paid plus data option. To use a crude but apt simile paying for an escort is paying for silence and discretion - that is why they are more expensive. (Regardless of client and worker sex and/or gender.)

Piracy was a decent demonstration of the hard facts of the (illicit) market - all of the draconian enforcement and DRM didn't make a dent in demand but improved distribution and fairer prices did. Just like how most people don't change their own oil from it being a hassle iTunes and Steam did more to reduce illegal downloads than any enforcement efforts.

I think it would make the "pay per click" option disappear, leaving only the "pay per view". And you would determine conversion rate from the view, not the click.

I don't know

But I know I will keep blocking ads because they slow down the website and consume a lot of bandwidth

Well, maybe a subscription for every site is not the right business model, we could imagine a lot of different ones. For example, automatic tipping when you spend more than x minutes on a website (something similar to what brave is trying to do), or pay by article (a few cents) on news sites.

Eventually people won't be able to subscribe to every site they want content from obviously. Look at netflix / hulu / amazon videos / youtube red ... It adds up very quickly.

The ones I would actually use.

None

Most of them. And the ones I wouldn't pay for I wouldn't miss.

I look at it this way: some sites might be worth paying for, none are worth being tracked for or being eye-raped by ads. I don't know why anyone would think it is a good idea to try and make money on something no one is willing to pay for.

About the adnauseam topic: while paywalled sites makes it clear that you need to pay for their content or services, the one with ads don't. You are candidly browsing the web and suddenly they just shove tons of trackers and ads down your browser, no question asked.

This is read by some people as an act of war, who are then motivated to retaliate using weapons like adnauseam. Of course they should just ignore or block the whole websites in questions, but no one can pretend they drew first blood.

I wouldn't really like to manage multiple subscriptions, but what I would be willing to do is pay for membership to a service which offers me access to a wide variety of ad-free websites. Kind of like how a cable subscription gets me access to a large number of channels (but without the commercials).

The most useful ones are already free. So, probably none that I don't already. Development resources (free, hosted by companies with incentive to spread the info). Wikipedia. Rarely I still manage to stumble on some non-monetized hobbyist sites, despite their being hard to find under current search algos (infrequent updates, no attention to SEO, no padding things to look like "more unique content per page" to Google), and that's nice.

The rest I already pay for (Netflix, which just barely skates by being so cheap), are essentially utility things (bank sites, government), or are so low-value I'd probably be better off not using them, frankly. Or are simply piracy sites (library genesis / scihub), for that matter.

Any topic I scratch the surface of in online research I end up at excellent, totally free (not ad supported) resources or finding that I need to track down some books, or some combination of the two.

"Pay money up front, or take all these ads, and no there is NO other way, nu-uh. NO other way. So it is really your choice, but only these 2"

Yeah that is not really a good argument is it?