They may be additionally compensated for having created something (or contributing to the creation of something in a collective effort), but it's that stretch between conception and emergence that is most critical, and for which the market, as it stands, has no answer. And cannot have an answer.
This is more like 300 fanatical content consumers deciding to give a certain person $5 a month so that they spend as much time as possible producing content.
Allocating this as a tax would more than replace all present spending on authors, screenwriters, journalists, and musicians.
The current problem isn't that we can't or won't pay, or we can't or won't accept advertising. It's that each generation of adtech becomes more and more user-hostile until we're forced to fight back.
So the popup became the pop-under, and devolved into popup bombs until browsers were forced to act. Tracking has gone from associating an ad-view with its context, to growing that context across their entire ad network until they've profiled exactly what demographics and markets you fit into, and browsers are starting to fight back.
It's not that we won't accept advertising. It's that advertising is in a constant race to the bottom. And I think - I hope - we're about hitting the bottom of the current generation of adtech.
* It's intrusive.
* It's distracting.
* It promotes a host of anti-usability features
* It's creepy, and you're creeping me out.
* Ads themselves price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain
* The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues
* The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy.
* It's not relevant.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...
Adding to the above, from four years ago, I've since realised that advertising:
* Promotes crap content.
* Kills quality content.
* Undermines truth and liberal democracy. Supports and sustains demagoguery, fascism, and institutional oppression.
See Dwight McDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culturei" (https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...) (1953) (PDF), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totaltarianism (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=arendt%20origins%20tota...), and Gerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television* (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Mander+arguments+elimin...), for starters.
Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 lecture, "Commercialism and Journalism", available from the Internet Archive, addresses most of the modern complaints against advertising, at a time when it was just beginning to massively re-shape (and, to be fair, enable) the modern media landscape.
Apart from NoScript, are there other good ways to handle "subscribe to my mailing list" modals?
Information is a public good.
https://www.scribd.com/document/370801872/Joseph-Stiglitz-Kn...
It already happens in Portugal for eg. LUSA News Agency is a funded by the Government in order to guarantee exactly what I just described. LUSA is not perfect but it's role should be treated as a public good.
"The Debate Over Public Policy and the Emergence of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States, 1927-1935"
http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v021/...
When the BBC was formed in the UK, the concept of allowing media ownership to be in the hands of private corporations was considered unthinkable.
Government funding has its own set of considerations, though in balance it seems generally preferable, most especially if funding and control are separated.
I've 2 niche blogs and tried several ways of monetisation along the years. I only kept a direct ad (that adblocks can't detect) and amazon affiliates. I ditched Adsense (from 50€ it dropped to 1€/month) and tried donations (patreon, buymeacoffee, paypal) but it's not the right niche for that (art students).
If you keep your content focused/niche enough I think overtime you should have a nice following.
I would love to discuss the problems with your two blogs, I'm actually trying to solve them.
Not sure why we haven't added some such one-click "pay $0.2 for this article/video/etc" option to our web browsers. That was the whole promise of micropayments back in the day.
Good Content would be peer reviewed by its readers, like it happens here on HN, and those reviews would in return garant those contributing some discount or even reward.
We are so far away from that like earth from mars.
Imagine this: (1) The publisher starts writing quality content in order to gather as much subscribers as possible. (2) Th publisher gets a comfortable amount of subscribers. So it starts to wind down the content quality, thus reducing his costs. (3) Now the users aren't getting the quality they are paying for. (4) Maybe slowly, but surely the subscribers will cancel their subscriptions and ultimately lose their trust in the publication itself. (5) The world is balanced once again.
Now this last point is important, the relationship between the producer and the consumer is based on trust.
And that was back in 1996..