> Why?
> I believe Google Adwords killed the web. Google Adwords incentivized sites to peddle SEO optimized garbage. Sites who aren't are forced to optimize for email capture so they can market directly to you. Search results now show "news", ads, and SEO spam instead of surfacing information.
> You ought to be able to search something on Google and get an answer to your question without signing up for some newsletter.
I find the current state of the web, post-AdWords, disappointing too.
edit: apologies, it was submitted and discussed a month ago
Do we want to make sites attempting to do something other than SEO-spam harder to find in search?
Perhaps if Google didn't treat every other party as a source of wealth to plunder, by hook or by crook, but rather shared the spoils with the very content generators so crucial to their own existence, out of some sense of fair play, we'd have a marginally more healthy ecosystem today.
Perhaps.
But I'm content to burn the whole thing down. All ad-supported business models are eventually utterly toxic. Well, at least the ones that succeed.
There is already RFERL aka Radio Freedom.
OTOH:
In UK, Germany and a bunch of other countries there is state-funded media.
One can argue that in France or Russia all media is state funded and state controlled.
Think about what you're asking. You want the government to take your money and give it to media outlets of their choosing? Just give your own money to the media outlets of your choosing.
No, that's a benefit journalist enterprises sell.
The primary purpose of journalism (at least, in a capitalist society), is, as for any other industry, to capture and deliver value to the capitalist class.
Is he the capitalist class, this person making say $40,000/year? Are his customers meant to be? Do they become the capitalist class when there are two of them writing the newsletter and they split the money?
No, I said that the primary purpose of the industry was one thing, not the primary purpose of a particular one man operation that is inherently made marginal by the structure of the economy, and is not the typical of the industry as a whole.
I don't think that's totally fair. I would love to be able to pay for a single day of the NY Times or Wall Street Journal, the same way I can buy a copy of the print edition on a given day. But, it's all or nothing with the paywalls - I have to buy a full annual subscription just so I can read half a dozen articles one or two days a week.
I don't think most people are opposed to paying for content - look at kindle sales. But that doesn't mean most people want to commit to an annual subscription that runs in the 100's of dollars.
I honestly have no solution for their problem. It's a bad position to be in. Their content is just not valuable enough to pay for. At least for me.
I pay for books and ebooks all the time, so I'm not opposed to paying for reading material. It's just that I value books much higher than news or opinion pieces.
If digital advertising was banned and good journalism could be identified by "I have to pay a small amount for this", competition would drive the costs down in a way which makes proper use of that scalability, and we would all be better off.
I think modern professional journalism was a fluke of history. Without independent funding it's going right back to its original state. And the only way that independent funding will happen is with a highly educated and involved citizenry, which scares the living crap out of the powerful.
They don't give you the option to pay for an article. The only two choices are pay a couple hundred bucks for an annual subscription that you likely won't use more than a few times, or bypass the paywall.
To follow your analogy, this would be like if the gas station only sold gum in packs of 365 - you want a day's worth of gum, but you can only buy a yearly supply. I'll bet you'd see a lot more people stealing gum.