I don’t think we can have it both ways, or at least it is very difficult and we don’t have a great compromise solution.
There are other ways to get money to support your work, and if those ways are too painful right now, that's just an opportunity for disruption. Even better, it's an opportunity to prove that disruption doesn't have to be exploitative.
Not every website is the WSJ or Bloomberg, which cater to markets that are willing to pay for content.
But no. The internet enabled vast, invasive user tracking, therefore vast, invasive user tracking is the only conceivable way to sell advertising.
The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.
[dat]: https://dat.foundation/
[scuttlebutt]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.
As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.
I'm one of "those consumers" and I'm actively looking for sustainable ways to pay content producers.
Here's what I do currently:
- subscribe to two newspapers in addition to the mandatory payments to the national news broadcaster.
- donate to the Guardian
- buy on Blendle
If there was a way to pay for single pay-walled stories I would probably use it a few times a week in addition to my current subscriptions.
I'm not interested in any more subscriptions (unless they are all inclusive like Spotify so I can cancel my current subscriptions, and even then I'm not sure since I actually want to support those two papers and think I do so better through direct payments than through revenue sharing through a huge international tech company. )