The author isn't trying to profit from the reader's attention; it's just a personal blog. An ad-based business would. Neither is right or wrong, but the latter is distinctly annoying.
The bottom line is if you hate ad-based businesses, start paying for things.
No. If your business model requires you to do evil things, your business should not exist.
Anyway, I do pay for services that provide value. I was a paying Kagi customer until recently, for example (not thrilled with the direction things are going there now though).
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...
Either way, thanks for sharing.
The mean value of adverts on a page is in the order of a tiny fraction of a cent per reader, which is presumably enough for the businesses that continue to exist online. If it was possible to pay this amount directly instead, and have an ad-free experience, I suspect many would do so, as the cumulative amount would usually be negligible. Yet so far, no-one’s figured it out.
(I should mention, there are very strong reasons why it’s difficult to figure out currently, but AIUI these are rooted in the current setup of global payments and risk management by credit card companies.)
Music and video streaming services are syndicating content from millions of creators into single subscription services. Why is it so impossible to make mega conglomerates for textual content? Why is nobody doing this?
Right now, creators are forced to make YouTube videos, because that's their most viable path to getting paid for their work. Why does it have to be this way, when a lot of what they do would be better as text instead of as a talking head?
I guess the truth is that the large subscription 'streaming' services (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, etc.) are effectively micropayment systems, just not quite as transparent and/or direct as the concept I'd envisioned.
As to why there's no 'Spotify for newspapers/magazines/blogs', I don't know. We're definitely not the first to consider the question. Maybe the economics (too few customers?) doesn't make sense? Maybe there's resistance to it amongst socially- and politically-connected owners and journalists who like their position in society? Maybe because it would presumably require centralisation (in terms of where and how it was consumed, akin to using the Spotify app to listen to music) and ultimately commoditisation of the media? Maybe the modern drift away from reading and longer-form media makes it unattractive, leading to a quality drift to the bottom?
A better way to characterize what's happening is that there is a lot of material out there that no one would ever pay for, so those companies instead try to get people's attention and then sell it.
Their bait never was and never will be worth anything. People aren't "paying with ads"; they're being baited into receiving malware, and a different group of people pay for that malware delivery.
Don't they have enough money?
But no matter the cost of a thing, you can always "make more" by adding ads and keeping the cost as is. So eventually, every service seems to decide that, well, you DESERVE the ads, even if you pay.
Sure, competition could solve this, but often there isn't any.