it's not perfect, im using an ad blocker and i can't understand how people can surf the internet without one but hopefully we can find a solution the change the whole free internet based on ad with something else
The problem is that people are using their ad budget to compete with free content, but the free content is still going to be there it will just appear higher up in the search results if various bad actors aren't paying for a bunch of SEO.
Debatable.
For tech content this might be true but for general news, investigative journalism, reporters, etc. that probably won't be the case as the activity itself implies fixed costs.
You can see how well donation links work on content sites and open source projects for proof.
I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.
That's for long form video content (series, movies, documentaries, etc.).
Text content is rarely something people pay for.
How many newspapers are you subscribed to?
> I personally pay $50/month on Patreon to various makers.
Sure, but look what the ratio of Patreon subscriber to viewers is for Twitch streams or Youtube content creators is.
On the other hand, a whole lot of recycled content mills where all the $0.05/paragraph contract writers are about to be replaced by GPT-4 probably would.
If you want money reliably you need to explicitly ask for it.
This is very rarely the case, though, and also the fundamental error the original article is making. The vast majority of page loads are blind link clicks. The user doesn't know what is behind it before clicking. They're trying to take a quick sample and maybe stay on the page and read something if it proves sufficiently interesting and not obnoxious compared to the thousands of otherwise identical pages with near identical content.
It is not people trying to grab your magazine to take home without paying. It's people at the magazine stand browsing through all of them trying to decide if any are worth buying. While thumbing through the covers, we don't want autoplay videos taking over our speakers and waking up our sleeping spouse, malicious JavaScript querying the OS to figure out what our hardware capabilties and settings are to fingerprint us, thumbnails of a bunch of women with E cups in tight shirts with no relation to a story trying to get us to browse through to something else. We just want to see if whatever the hell we clicked on is actually worth reading. You're automatically assuming we made that decision before loading the page.
It's also my right and in my power to open your web site on my browser, delete your ad and read what you wrote. Once your web page leaves your server and enters my computer, it's no longer yours. You are no longer in control. You cannot dictate to me what can and can't be displayed on my screen.
Black Mirror did a delightfully dark take on this, it might have even been the first episode.
Guy can buy out the ads, spending currency to skip them. One day he doesn't have the money and is forced to watch the ad. Literally forced. If he averts his eyes, the ad follows them. If he closes his eyes, they torture him with high pitched noise until he opens them. It drives him to the point of physical violence.
It's one of my favorite episodes. The incredible inhumanity of it all, and I bet these ad tech companies would think nothing of it.