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Comment by danr4 | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with your correction to my analogy, though I do not think it changes the conclusions.

I don't think it's a problem that consumers aren't willing to pay for content. That's literally the description of consumers, to decide what to consume, how to use it, and what they are willing to give in exchange.

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Except if it came down to it, everyone would be in an uproar about having to pay monthly fee to visit every site on the net.. I'm willing to bet half the people in this thread who say if people want to be paid for their content, to charge for it, not use ads, don't donate to Wikipedia.

It absolutely flabbergasts me the amount of people in the tech world who don't realize to run a top site delivering content to you costs thousands of dollars a month in hosting, let alone to pay the bills of the people who do the work.

Pay $5/mo to all your favorite sites... I visit 10+ sites a day average, that's $50 on top of my internet bill that is already $60/mo.

I'd rather be shown an ad that I've conditioned to block out mentally than pay $50/mo extra to look at 10 sites a day only.

So yeah, you're right, you can block ads, but when ad blocking proliferates to the point that it's not feasible for any of these sites to keep running, then they go away..

Now you're left complaining because none of your favorite sites are around.

So let them uproar! If wikipedia shuts down because they don't have money because people won't donate, it's OK, it's called reality. It would be a pity, but that's life.

I do realize the costs and I do realize they have to make money to put food in their mouth. But it's no different than any other business, it's either you have a sustainable model, or you don't. You can't have it all. The web is not a utopia.

I doubt that you are making a site 5$ per month. Does anyone know reasonable numbers what a single recurring visitor can make you?

I don't know about a single visitor, but for the top sites revenue per 1000 visits is on average around $10. For recurring visitors it's probably more since advertisers have more info about them.

There are a lot of factors that determine the value of a visit so take this info with a grain of salt.

Let's say that a site owner switched to a micropayment model. And they charged per page view what they had been earning on average from serving ads. They'd be fine, right?

I can't imagine that many sites are earning $5 per month in ad income for each of their regular users. But maybe someone could point to some reliable data?

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