Re:Funding Choices – Google’s new tool for GDPR compliance a...
by always_good on Monday September 17, 2018 @10:39AM
(#18006309)
You can see this in action on HN when people constantly use big publications like The Verge and NYT when complaining about ads or suggesting that everyone needs to find a new business model.
Meanwhile my forum now costs more money than it brings in. It's been giving teens a place to write collaborative fiction for over 10 years now.
Seems a bit sad that we'll eventually just be left with the sites big enough to live without ads. We're in the middle of a great centralization which you'd think most of HN would be wary of.
Instead I see the opposite, people basically welcoming it with a bloodlust in their eyes. What they don't realize is that their favorite examples of ad-dependent websites cast around HN like The Verge will be the last to die.
People may subscribe for big newspapers and such, but they won't subscribe to a lot of smaller blogs, for example, on various blogging platforms, which do provide value, but they are not big enough to warrant a subscription.
Ads solve this case and I haven't heard any viable alternative for them for small players.