Am i expected to pay to 50 different sites? That quickly becomes unmanageable.
Maybe something like radio stations have is required for the internet. Where the artists get paid based on how often a radio station plays their song.
You’re expected to find some number of sites X that let you pay to access ad-free content that total to an amount you find palatable and limit yourself to those.
It’s not trivial, and it’s inconvenient. The sites like that are relatively few and far between.
But it means you’re making a sacrifice to support sites that are trying to break out of the model that you don’t support.
If enough people do that, the incentive forms to make paying for content upfront and ad-free and suddenly the market will solve the problem of 50 sites wanting payment, be it through easier payment mechanisms or “share cropping”
There are apps that had thousands of downloads and great reviews that failed because of peoples in unwillingness to pay for them.
How will you know you’re going to like a news story before you pay to read it?
The metrics you have are the same as any other type of content, word of mouth, reviews, past performance of the content creator.
People will spend 10$ on a movie ticket when critics and reviewers are split on if it’s a good movie. They’ll spend 20$ to try a new dish they might not like on the recommendation of a single person, even an impartial waiter. But they don’t value apps so they don’t pay for them. People will go to app developers with their brilliant idea and act shocked when they get a 5 figure estimate because they figure app development is a dime a dozen.
Likewise I doubt many people appreciate the true cost of the content they consume.
Or maybe an emotional approach like the Guardian or Patreon would work better.
The point here, though, is that you can both like the content and want to support the creator yet choose to block ads.
But if the creator only offers ads as a method of payment and you consume their content while blocking their ads, regardless of what you want to do, you aren’t paying them for their content.
At that point your options are to continue consuming the content (and preferably not post comments vilifying the content creator driven to using ads like the original comment I responded to above does, which I take exception to) or to not consume the content, signaling to the content creator that something isn’t working about their ad-based model.
That's really simple, more people need to be willing to pay.
I mean, I say in other parts of the page that I can't pay what the content is worth, but I'm actually not sure that's true for myself. But it is true for the general public.
And it's not they can't because they can't afford it, but rather, they don't want to. So we can make it easier to pay, for example. We can try and explain what advertising is doing. But in the end, I don't see a change happening.
People just seriously undervalue content.
People won't pay 99 cents for an app, so the market switched to IAP and suddenly people were gladly be nickled and dimed for more than 99 cents with intrusive applications designed from the ground up to drive IAP.
It's not like content generators wouldn't rather just take your money. I'm sure they don't love the hoops they have to jump through (it cost money to implement those ads too) to get inconsistent ad revenue that is often not very transparent and rife with pitfalls.
But until enough people to at least cover the cost of content are willing to pay, we'll see ads be king.