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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

Maybe advertising isn't the future of the web?

I know I'm talking hypotheticals, not anything that helps people make money of actual work done online, right now. But I'd be ready to pay for a fairly done flat rate service that gives me access to quality content on a variety of sites for a reasonable price a month. If you do that, companies would not have to track anything after confirming my login, it would no longer be the main revenue stream.

Are there any good estimates how much money the internet makes from the ad data of an average person, per month? Like, spread among multiple websites? Is that too crazy an amount to ever expect people to pay?

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This has been tried countless times and there are dozens of options available. There's no scale to it.

There wouldn’t be any scale to adtech either without massive adoption. If adtech collapses as a viable stream, something will quickly take its place.

It's either direct or indirect payments. Direct payments haven't scaled so indirect (ads) will continue.

This is a human behavior issue. You would need to change the behavior of billions of people before the ads model gets affected.

It seems to be working fine for Spotify and Netflix. Is there something special about journalism that means it wouldn't work there?

It's barely working for Spotify and Netflix is testing ads.

Music and movies are highly repeatable and have production costs that users recognize and value. News and general content is not valued the same so nobody wants to pay for it. The severe dropoff in any paywalled site shows the effect of charging for news.

I initially upvoted this for the first sentence, but then I decided I disagreed with the rest of it.

First, there was the web, and there weren't any ads, and that was just the way things were. Then there were ads on the web, and it got to be unpleasant. Then there were adblockers, and things were good again. Then there were adblocker-blockers, and I stopped visiting sites that used them.

I honestly don't know how you're going to make money out there, but it's not my problem.

I'm not a kook (yeah, I am a kook) but I distinctly remember an Atari Lynx racing game with a Marlboro billboard in it. I remember thinking "wow, video games are going mainstream!" when 13-year-old me saw that, and how this was The Future. Advertising hasn't kept up with me, and I'm 44 years old. That's why I say it's not my problem.

So, you basically want cable TV for the internet? Yeah, we all know how that's going to work out, don't we?

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