The media deserve their share of the blame. Besides participating in this unethical ad market, they've cranked up the emphasis on sensationalist, click bait garbage at the cost of real journalism.
To continue with the fishing/aquatic analogy: don't blame people for filtering their water or buying bottled water after all of the toxic waste that's been dumped into the river.
Who's to say paywalls will end up being the norm? And what happens if the paywall is abstracted away behind a Spotify-like news interface?
In the Netherlands there's an online subscription-based news and magazine service, it's doing quite well. It seems quite succesful in engaging their readers more than the traditional media.
I do also see that we live in a more chaotic time than say a 100 years ago. I think much of it can be attributed to the rise of fast information transport systems, computers and the Internet, but that does not mean I have an obligation to support a business model I find immoral, because it might in some way indirectly benefit journalism and democracy in general. Perhaps abolishing the advertising model will make space for interesting other models, like community-curated news, patronage, paying for archives/more in-depth articles, etcetera.
It's not a tragedy of the commons if the only "victims" are a few companies. Companies are not "the commons", or humans for that matter. Companies fail all the time, and that's OK. Business models are not sacred cows that can never be slaughtered. If one business model stops working, companies will adapt and find new business models.
On the other hand, it can be argued that advertisements can have a negative influence on their viewers in many ways.
Every year! There are elections every year! Vote every year!
I don't think this claim can be made on the basis of site traffic. You would have to compare how many people actively support the ad system vs actively support the paywall system.
Assuming people that use adblocking software, support the paywall system as a default alternative, ~22% of internet users use adblockers[0] and (let's say) support a paywall system.
I would guess that of the 78% of people that don't use an adblocker, the majority of them don't know about them, rather than make a conscious decision to not use them.
Ad revenue model is winning on traffic because of three reasons
* lots of people don't know about adblockers
* the default configuration for browsers is to not do adblocking
* most people don't change defaults
I couldn't find any studies that have specific estimates of how many people dont know about adblocking software or know and don't use.
[0]https://iabuk.net/about/press/archive/iab-uk-reveals-latest-...
Fallacy of the excluded middle: among the choices you did not accept we have the option of returning the internet back to the laws that originally governed it, that is nothing commercial.
I don't personally want this across the board, but I am not convinced that the world wouldn't be better if that rule held for non fictional content.
If paywalls don't catch on, it's game over for he current model of societies. Because even if my contribution of a vote every four years seems quite small, it's still the currency that democracy depends on. And without an informed public, their decisions tend towards randomness, and are no longer a factor in the decision-making process.
All this isn't a new mechanism, it's basic tragedy of the commons. "It's my boat, and I'm gonna go out tonight, and fish as much as I want to. Nature belongs to me as much as to anyone else, and nobody has the right to tell me what to do, especially not in international waters".
There's nothing really wrong with that argument, except that many a fisherman has made it, and seen his haul cut to almost nothing when overfishing had decimated the population.