USA Today originally distributed their advertisements on paper without any user tracking. I don't see why advertising without tracking is so unthinkable today.

I'm of the opinion that at some point USA Today had demographic data on it's users. Maybe polled directly, or based on a list of names in their subscriber database cross referenced with some other database.

The idea that "user tracking" is now happening on the internet and not in print isn't true. Yes, internet tracking can follow you specifically, but that's because the systems have gotten faster and more connected.

This was true for a huge number of newspapers - user data was an enormous part of the ad business in the print days as well, and has some striking similarities to what happens today online.

Back then it took the form of the subscriber database as you suggest, and was used to help target and sell ads in the paper. The print industry often "sold" the subscriber list in detail to prospective advertisers to demonstrate the potential reach.

Losing detailed subscriber data was one of the primary objections many papers expressed to Apple's app store distribution model which can effectively render readers anonymous, as this was apparently one of the most valuable things they had.

Because it is two orders of magnitude less effective. Putting an ad for a blender in front of someone recently searching for blenders is 100x more effective than putting it in front of a random person.

This means the revenue they can charge for that ad is 100x less, which means that any sites without massive, massive user bases will perish, and those that survive will do it on a pittance.

People paid money for USA Today, and people looked at more advertisements in print papers.

It takes many more servers to deliver a 200mb page than it does a 600kb page

Servers are pretty cheap these days, and always getting cheaper. It's the staff salaries that are the real cost.

I think Patreon has the only good answer so far. There are multiple people on there that make top quality content and earn good money from it.

It's probably not an answer for every industry.

Or how to pay the people who create the content

It seems many people think content worth enjoying is somehow created and delivered freely.

Mmmm... and what about non-targeted ads ?

I mean: GDPR didn't forbid money. Not even advertising. Only using personal informations without explicit consent... Please, don't be too ridiculous and stop watching FoxNews :-D

There's not even anything wrong with targeted ads!

Behavioural targeting is fine!*

Contextual targeting is fine!

*In many circumstances.

It always was.

In the 90s, the N.Y. Times was $1 in my city and the local paper was $0.30. That covered paper, distribution and ink.

The ads paid for it, and I think the ads were more effective. IMO online ads are mostly fraud and bullshit.

You're aware that this is precisely how the web (successfully!) worked before it was taken over by marketing interests, right?

And it was funded by universities and a defense department project. Once we got the private sector into the experiment, it needed to pay for itself. Bandwidth isn't free, and neither is content creation.

Look at it: that's an RSS feed, basically. They could have had paywalled feeds with a standard payment system that people could write clients and aggregators for. No ads, just subscriptions.

The irony is that we'll get there, eventually: Apple and Google are slowly agreeing a payment system and then they will push it into the browser, and everyone will use it.

If the payment system allows for microtransactions (and, ideally, allows for ads or alternative payment methods for people who don't have the cash to be micro'd), we get a worldwide web somewhat shaped like the one we have today. That seems similar to what Google is pursuing with Contributor (https://contributor.google.com/v/marketing).

If we just do big-dollar monthly or daily subscription paywalls, we end up with a Balkanized web where I can't read the article you're reading unless I pay for it. That'll significantly change the way interactions happen on the worldwide web.