The web is a big popularity contest, with Google search / Facebook rank being a modified popularity contest. What's popular and entertaining is unlikely to be what's true or useful.
People are very willing to pay for accurate, useful information. Most people do not need accurate or useful information for the majority of their needs in life -- nor do they even want it as we can tell from their revealed preferences.
The web is not even all that popular compared to television. Judging from the websites of many formerly prestigious magazines, many people just use the web as an enhanced edition of TV Guide with some chat features built in.
TV is many orders of magnitude more popular than computer media in the developed world. Many people are happy to pay TV subscriber fees for inaccurate but entertaining shows. The most popular programs are fantasies and sports games rather than documentary programs.
>I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.
Someone tell Jeff Bezos that all those book sales are illusory. But yes, we should expect the web to more and more be the equivalent of a trash heap of brochures and junk publications pointing people towards higher quality options, with the occasional equivalent of a curated public library (like Archive.org).
>I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content.
They really do when it's important to them. But what people say is important to them when other people are looking is not necessarily what is really important to them.
Do people really believe this?
I've been chasing a copy of "L'envol des Alouettes" by Charles Marchetti for years. Occasionally, once every few years, a single copy appears on amazon.fr or Abe Books for around 200 Euros and is snapped-up within hours. There is not one single digital copy of it available anywhere.
And that's just one title I've had on my wishlist for over a decade.
> I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.
Advertising really muddles everything and makes content feel "free", even though it's clearly not. Content producers should do a better job of making it clear that if users don't pay, they won't get their content.
There are few reasons I do this: (1) uBlock is overzealous -- it breaks some websites and I'm not interested enough to tweak it to not break them. (2) Sites I like (e.g., boingboing, The Sweethome) don't get any money when I use uBlock, but they do if I use Contributor
I recognize that I'm a weird Silicon Valley type but I'm hopeful that we aren't too rare. There are dozens of us. Dozens!
Netflix: $8 = no ads
Google Contributor: $10 = half as many ads on a few websites.
uBlock is free for no ads. You have to be better than that. The web is a weird place. I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content. Part of the problem is that the internet is brimming with garbage, and no one wants to pay for garbage. If a user incidentally visits a site and it isn't what they were looking for, they don't want part of their monthly ad-bidding funds to go to that site.
I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content. Maybe if we are forced to pay for every view, we'll think twice about where it comes from and not waste money on clickbait. Probably not.