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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Option 3, let the ad funded internet die and keep the remaining good parts.

The problem is that the most popular alternative, microtransactions, doesn't work. Turns out there is a big psychological barrier between free and literally any payment at all, even a few pennies. People are sensitive to the danger of being nickled and dimed to death.

And that's before you get into the problem of how to set up a clearinghouse where you can handle microtransactions without being eaten alive by fees.

I think taxes are the biggest hurdle for microtransactions. You are legally required to report taxes in _every_ country where you have customers. This means that the customer will need to fill in address information for each website they want to use which is also a high barrier. And if you run an online business it won't take long before you have to report taxes in 200 countries. It's a job on its own to administrate that!

With advertisements you receive payments from a single party, and because it's a business-to-business transaction it's tax free.

If ad-based business models truly become unviable, they will find a new one. Ad-based businesses suck all the air out of the room, preventing other models from even forming. It'll take effort to find better models, but they'll come. But TBH, I don't see the ad-based model dying any time soon.

There are plenty of reasons to post good content that are not related to ads, and very weird incentives to write good content otherwise. Content for ads is riddled with SEO, hyped headlines, short shallow and unoriginal articles.

Good content is posted by people and companies for indirect benefits: a researcher makes videos about papers to motivate and held himself accountable to the public, a company publishes documentation and tutorials that are related to their business, a hobbyist does the same for pure fun. A teacher posts lesson plans to collaborate with other teachers. We'll be fine without content-for-ads.

> People are sensitive to the danger of being nickled and dimed to death.

And yet, people will sign up for multiple subscription services (Netflix, Disney plus, HBO max, Amazon prime, etc), which I consider to be the same as being nickeled and dimed.

Consider a Netflix like service where you paid $0.50 per show you watched. It happened seamlessly and you just saw a bill at the end of the month. Would you have the same video viewing habits?

Services like this exist, but total revenue is so small they don't even register on most charts. People don't like it.

Well, I watch maybe 1 movie a month. So, .50 sounds pretty good.

I thought the porous paywall + subscription model is the most popular alternative?

Ad funding would never stop because people wanting to make money off content would never stop - it just becomes more subtle. Think sponsored posts, product placement, added bias.

Imagine a plain text blog run by an individual, good quality technical content, and a company comes and offers $10k to write a blog post about their product after trying it. If the author decides not to disclose the financial motivation, you now have a subtle biased funded advert that no adblocker will save you from.

We already have mountains of shilled astroturf on the internet. I'm fine with it since shill content tends to be low quality and not too difficult to distinguish (except in google SERPS, which is another problem).

Legitimate content creators won't just blindly hop on the shill bandwagon because building a following is hard and takes time, and getting caught shilling can destroy your credibility and cause you to bleed followers VERY quickly. Adding a sponsor call-outs will probably be the ultimate go-to for legitimate content creators, but even that must be done carefully as pushing low quality sponsors will also hurt subscriber numbers.

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