The ad-based web economy had produced the current publishing dystopia in the first place and prevents the development of a sane business model.
Ah, the 'better business model' argument! A curious specimen, men often speak its name, but rarely agree how it looks or its habitat. Is it a donation model? Wait, no, that doesn't work. A paywall? Ah, but you want content for free. Philanthropist support? Oh, you don't like the conflict of interest. Micropayments? I suppose you have some cunning way of mitigating the transaction costs, without computationally expensive solutions like bitcoin.
Here's my proposition: post a model that is known to work, known to scale, for general purpose content, and you will have a startup on your hands. Otherwise - I ask you to withdraw your comment.
[In reply to the below - as we have reached the thread limit: there will _always_ be free competition. The problem is: without advertising, the only players left will be those with deep pockets, and deep interests to protect - the state, churches, oligarchs and political groups]
Don't the current streaming tech pay artists per literal play? If so, wouldn't that mean more money to the artists since all plays are counted?
My understanding is a bit outdated now perhaps, but would like to understand better if someone knows better :-)
You say that as if server space is super expensive, but it isn't, certainly not compared to other forms of media. It's entirely possible to publish to the web without being an elite, people and businesses did it for years before advertising on the web became a thing.
The people were hobbyists and the businesses had other projects.
Relying on "interested members of the public" for news is how people like Alex Jones get started.
Yes, but my point is that publishing to the web doesn't require advertising on the web. Nor does advertising on the web require javascript.
>Relying on "interested members of the public" for news is how people like Alex Jones get started.
It's how a lot of people got started. You seem to be implying some relationship between the presence of political extremism and the absence of advertising, but I don't see any evidence the two are correlated.
Semi-anonymous writers posting blogs are none of those.
The main reason is advertising, which is ultimately how this web content is paid for.
But there could be alternatives. We could create static img elements that could securely and discretely record whether they were viewed by a human (to prevent ad fraud). We could support simple animations and interactivity in a secure, resource-friendly way. And we could allow these to be disabled by user agents (e.g. epileptics).
Could newspapers exist without online advertising? Possibly, but only in specialised niches. Consumers have shown that they will always seek the cheapest, most accessible forms of information - even when provided by highly biased, unreliable sources.
The danger to killing online advertising is that it creates a world where the only people who can afford to publish are those with other interests - plutocrats, politicians, churches - and who will inevitably bankroll news only to further political ends.