> How exactly will higher quality news publishers pay for their existence? Most people are conditioned to not pay for it. So where does the money come from?

I can't find the link where I read this, but targeted ads tend to be detrimental for high-quality publications. Targeted ad peddlers are mercenary. If they want to target a high-quality site's audience, they'll run just enough ads to profile them, then target that audience on cheaper, lower-quality sites which that they also frequent.

tl;dr: Targeted ads and tracking mean advertisers have the technology to shaft high-quality sites in favor of cheaper, lower quality ones.

The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left.

> The idea is that small publishers go out of business and further media consolidation occurs. Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation and limited choices left.

This is by far the most likely result. Why run an ecommerce store when you can rely on Amazon or eBay to shoulder the costs and risk?

GDPR will cause further consolidation, and ironically the companies people are forced to use will have everyone opt-out of the GDPR law by spamming them constantly with "opt-in" links until they click the "stop spamming me" button and the situation is exactly the same as it was yesterday, but with less competition.

Unintended consequences indeed.

> Those remaining can force personalized ad compliance by virtue of their reputation

Hm? I don't see this happening. Under GDPR you have to offer the same service 'without detriment' if the user does not want personalized ads. Most people would pick this option as long as it is clear to do so. I don't think reputation makes much of a difference. As far as I can tell, they could become paid subscriptions more likely.

Anecdata point: I am a paying The Guardian subscriber. I pay because in my opinion quality should be supported.

That is actually an excelent question!

The high quality news will be gladly paid for, while there will be far less clickbait sites as the ads revenues will drop. We will have less garbage on the internet and this is actually great, on the other side, the real journalism (not news like how to enlarge your penis) will hopefully come back into spotlite.

Maybe...clickbait garbage is so cheap to produce I don’t think you’ll see a large decline there.

Quality small to medium publishers are the ones who will get squeezed hard.

It would be pretty shocking if suddenly EU users started happily paying for journalism. It’s going to be an exciting petri dish.

The issue with paying for journalism is that quality journalism is spread out over many, many publishers on the web. I can't afford to pay for subscriptions to dozens of quality news sources. Until micro-payments or, more likely, a multi-publisher, subscription-based model is available, I would not be interested in moving to a payments based system.

Ironically, the most effective micro-payment or subscription-based system will probably come from Google or Facebook in the end.

I agree micro-payments are likely to be Google/Facebook/Apple driven. The EU has been pushing for a mandatory "link tax" that may help fund some news organizations. That'll force more media consolidation though.

I wouldn't be so sure. It's not just you that has to pay for the news and other websites, it's your entire family. Would your grandma pay for it? Would you pay for this for your children?