You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
At least with Spotify and Netflix there is some kind of rev share thing in place. It's not very fair of course and a bit biased towards rewarding content creators that I don't necessarily like (or are in need of more money). But it's better than having to cherry pick creators. Somehow publishers have resisted creating such a thing for written media. We have this broken model of ad supported media and media outlets taking most of that revenue and paying really shitty wages to journalists, many of whom are working on a freelance basis and get paid pitiful amounts per word. Why do we have all these middlemen?
You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.
Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.
I'll just say that looking back on my life consuming media (that started long before the consumer Internet was around), there has never been a better selection of media that I enjoy than now.
I've never watched reality shows or sitcoms, the kind of stuff that dominated mass media for a long time... I have interests that don't necessarily fall into the mainstream, so finding interesting or quality content was hard, and shows/films/docs were few and far between..
But now? The current system, while imperfect, at least allows for every possible topic and niche to be somewhat sustainable.
The sheer quantity of media has absolutely grown exponentially so there's definitely a lot more bad media, and media that isn't for me, but in terms of choice for myself, it's incredibly good.
Obviously YMMV and this is just my anecdotal experience, but I don't consider the system to be broken (even though, again, it's certainly not perfect).
If you offer content for free I'm not going to pay for it. I don't tip, I don't buy micro transactions in games, I don't pay for discord nitro or buy "collector's edition" versions of games or twitch subscriptions or anything like that.
Simply, if I don't have to pay I don't. And I certainly won't waste my life watching ads just so someone can earn a fraction of a cent.
I don't feel any need to justify that, I don't feel bad about it. These tactics earn tons of money, and if that ever stops they'll stop doing it and do something else instead. Until then I'll happily take advantage of all the free stuff. Someone else wants to donate to subsidize me that's great, go right ahead. I'm gonna keep my money.
You justify with 'if you offer content for free, I'm not going to pay for it'. Agreed with microtransactions and stuff. But with youtube videos? The content is not actually offered for free. It precisely relies on ads to exist. So the content is offered with ads/with subscription (i.e. not free), and you are using an adblocker to bypass this. So you are just leeching out of the other users, and is not sustainable.
As long as I can use youtube for free with an ad blocker (and sponsorblock, amazing plugin) I will. If google doesn't like that they better figure out a solution. Not my problem.
The thing with ads is: it's not free money. We pay for it. All of us. It's part of the price when we buy goods and services.
If advertising wasn't possible, items would be cheaper and we would have more money to pay for content directly. Cutting out the whole advertising industry out of the content payment loop would save so much money.
And yeah people would still buy stuff they need because they need it. And stuff they didn't need? Well good then that they're not buying it. Saving natural resources and money.
For videos and podcasts I subscribe to content creators on Patreon. I currently have four subscriptions for a total of around $12, and I give roughly the same amount to each.
I also avoid services that are monetized by ads elsewhere and pay for Kagi to get ad-free search. I will avoid all services that offer free tiers with ads and paid tiers without ads as I just fundamentally do not believe that the business model can work at scale without causing harm.
I also host my own email as I do not believe that it is possible to provide free email to people without somehow also doing things with their data or attention that goes against their interests.
A vocal minority doesn't outweigh hard numbers in this case. But that's one of the causes of enshittification, everything becoming metrics-driven.
The funny part is we should have all learned our lesson from the cable television days. Perhaps it's been long enough that everyone forgot, or maybe most of the market is just too young now, but there was a time in the US when cable television was ad-free. Commercials started sneaking into that with some regularity even though part of the draw to paying for cable tv was that it was commercial free. My brain wants to say this happened around the late 1980's? I might be wrong on that time frame, but at some point, like a frog sitting in a pot of water, the heat slowly rose and we found ourselves boiled to death with more and more commercial interruptions in our paid cable tv channels.
Then we watched the same thing happen with the Internet in the mid-2000's. Needless to say, I am a heavy user of ad blockers and Pi Holes. I especially loath sites that want to detect my ad blocker, and throw up a message trying to to guilt me into turning it off. The thing is I am not just blocking the ads, but also trying to block all the tracking that comes with those ads.
It's not really just about being annoyed by ads this time around. It's also about the right to privacy.
Not so much of a problem on modern TVs / set top boxes, as they usually offer that feature (though things get complicated if you want to do some channel flipping to e.g. quickly check how a sports game is going), but it was definitely a pretty big deal back in the day.
None of this applies to on-demand, of course.
I believe the metrics exist; I don’t believe they tell anyone useful information.
Beyond that, there's no lock-in to a video service beyond any exclusive show you're currently watching, so your decision to continue paying is on you.
- Rent seeking is not behavior I care for, and so much of the subscription service stuff is exactly that.
- I'm more than happy to pay for quite a few patreon/similar things.
- But _ultimately_ I don't just want to "consume" content, I want to share it. In fact I believe sharing the cultural artifacts I engage with is an essential part of a culture, and that getting in the way of that is morally wrong. So if your paywall gets in the way of _that_, I _will_ work around it.
Edit: also, the other side of the problem is that there are too many websites now. When it was Netflix and nearly everything there, I payed for it. I no longer pay for shows and movies, because things got _completely_ nuts. Similar thing with news. Reality is I pay _way_ more for Patreon than most people I know - not because of any moral reasons, but because I can actually afford that. And a typical news site asks as much as what I give to some of my favorite writers and painters.