The web only has two business models: users pay for a service or advertisers pay for a service.
I’m all in favor of paying for services, but it turns out most people prefer ads to breaking out their wallet.
And I'm not sure that's entirely true.
My own pet theory is that - payment method and model issues aside - the largest contributor is the uncomfortable questions it makes us ask ourselves.
When you pay for something, you ask yourself if whatever you are buying is actually worth the price. And a lot (most?) of what people seem to do on the web these days is feed their dopamine as much novelty as they can, as quickly as possible.
I don't know how much value people are expecting to get out of their browsing activities. Do they even think it's actually worth the time, if they stop and think about it? Asking them to pay for it is forcing them to confront this issue.
No wonder nobody pays.
For ad-supported social media, we're all just unpaid labor and we're told that labor has no value anyway.
Of course, by selling that position, they've also convinced the end user that the service is not worth paying for. But when there's nothing the end user wants to pay for, and ad revenue drying up, social media services will have to pivot to make money elsewhere.
The end result, not surprisingly, will result in a mixed model of subscription and ad revenue supporting content that the service has, in some way, paid for. Sound familiar? Of course, the end user will still not be paid for the labor contributed, but then the less the ad revenue depends on the user-generated "free" content, the closer the value of that labor tends to zero.