It'd be interesting to see if that's true for very many people. As an experiment, we could take a fork of good quality ad-blocker and change the way that it works so that rather than blocking the advert content when it detects an ad on a page it blocks the entire page.
That way users who don't want to reward content creators with money from adverts would no longer see the content they're refusing to pay for. And if the content creator gives users the option to pay instead of seeing adverts then a simple direct payment would make the site work because the ad blocker would no longer block anything.
I'm actually tempted to give that a try to see what impact it has on my browsing.
I don't really expect everyone to be willing to immediately block themselves from even seeing links to Content Provider X but I think it would benefit all users in the long run if a good chunk of people did it.
It would be helpful to see reviews of the content before you pay for it, like we have rotten tomatoes or imdb.
That definitely sounds like an interesting idea
That is a fantastic idea. Someone else mentioned Forbes and I just back out of their site when I see the full-page ad.
If the content has value you read it. If it doesn't you don't.
Bad example. SpaceX is one of the few companies where a lot of people would gladly work even for free. But yeah, I see what you mean.
(Also, I wouldn't discount the knowledge of tinkerers / hobbyists - they often know much more than their peers doing the same stuff for money, because when you have such a hobby you're by definition motivated to learn and understand. A lot of tech jobs (especially programming) are done by people who were force-fed some basic education and then kind of ended up doing it because they need the money.)
Back to the main point - it's not "I provided value to you and would like to be compensated". It's: "I created something that I say will provide you value, and for a chance of taking a look at it I demand you first talk with this random salesman (who is 100% totally legit and trustworthy!)". I.e. it's asking one to at best waste their time (at worst to hurt themselves seriously) to have a chance of viewing something that may or may not be of value.
Sites that shy away from the honest conversation, with the risk their user base will walk en masse, have themselves to blame.
I also don't know if content has value until after I've read it, and in the case of journalism I still don't know after I've read it, I'll just get closer to knowing if it was worth anything over time and in light of corroboration.
I'd prefer that my money go to journalism based on a combination of how honest and thorough I think it is and its agreement with my own beliefs. That determination comes from a track record, and I'm not going to pay for it before I see it. That's entirely incompatible with the idea of journalism that massive conglomerates with conflicts so universal that they just have to generally support the status quo, try to propagate. I send money to journalism online that I rarely read. I read journalism online that I'd never give a penny to. I have read David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman, and George Will. I'm not paying for that.
I read plenty of stuff from people I despise. I've spent hours reading white supremacist message boards. I'm supposed to send them money or else remain wilfully ignorant of their publicly expressed opinions? Not a chance. I collect John Birch material; its material that I personally think the world would be better off if it never had been written. I should feel an ethical obligation to the authors and give them money? Let them come get it.
edit: What's being discovered is that "publishers" were actually sellers of decorated paper. Once we didn't need paper, we didn't need them; the only reason they were ever considered managers of truth is because they were extremely large dealers of very detailed paper.
As a result of advances in technology, news, scholarly research, books, music, film, etc. can all be created and distributed by _anyone_, because it can be done at lower cost. This is bad news for some old school money-making schemes, but good news for consumers.
Perhaps consumers on the web are getting accustomed to "free" without any focus on quality. The classic arguments that lower cost means lower quality may be weakening.
Poor analogy: The computers we use today are less expensive than the ones we used in the 1980's. But who argues that they are lower quality? (I am not suggesting whether they are or not, just pointing out the arguments that people make.)
Yeah we could go back to a time when all you had was rumor before ad supported newspapers arrived, is that the world we want to be in where only those who want to support their view and who undertake subsidizing those views get to disseminate news and engage in journalism?
Citizen journalism is not the solution. First they may have bigger biases than professionals and they don't have an editorial board overseeing and critiquing their works, it may be more unbalanced and may have less access to the halls of power. So traditional journalism still appears to have a function.
You're making some pretty radical assertions without any attempt to justify them, so I'll draw a bit of an analogy to show why I feel like I'm missing something.
I don't see why your comment wouldn't apply almost 100% the same to shoplifting. I know the usual distinction drawn is that the marginal costs are different, but I don't really see how that's relevant: there's a (low) marginal cost to serving each page that's being lost. And anyway, the idea that the marginal cost is all that matters is beyond bizarre to me. There's a reason you buy bubble gum for more than the retailer paid for it, and it's because you're not only defraying the cost of the bubble gum to him.
> If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place.
"If retailers can't make money on goods without charging money for it, then those goods didn't need to be createdd in the first place". What does the mode of monetization have to do with whether the goods "needed" to be created? Isn't continual consumption of a site's content a revealed preference that pretty much by definition means that they're getting value out of it?
"Selling bubble gum, to me, represents a monetization strategy that says 'I made something, you want it, so I deserve to get paid' ". Again, I'm not seeing the difference in this case. The idea that something that many people choose to read has no value seems so obviously insanely wrong by definition that I must be misunderstanding you somehow.
Re both having a nonzero marginal cost: There is no consistent criminalization of wasting other people's time or money as they're trying to engage you commercially. Of course there's a separate system under which we evaluate if something is unlawful remote access of other people's computers, and I suppose that could be perverted to criminalize ad-blocking, but the sense of justice of the average citizen does not call for it.
So you agree to stop consuming it?
Ask your friends this: would they still read NYT articles if they had to pay 25 cents every time they landed on a new article? Any barrier to entry for the vast majority of people would have a profound impact on what they consume.
Charge people 50 cents for a plastic bag at the bodega and they'll say they don't need the bag. Give it to them for free by default and they'll take 2!
If you truly feel it has no value, which I doubt.
If you push out content and you can't make money on it without ads, then that content didn't need to be created in the first place. The argument then devolves to "there won't be any good content" but I'll _gladly_ roll the dice on that world to see what we're left with.
Ads, to me, represent a monetization strategy rooted in "I did something, and you're looking at, so I deserve to get paid" but that makes no sense. The disconnect here is the presumption that the content has any value to begin with. I think what scares traditional content-creators is the idea that the vast majority of content has no inherent value.