What is people's data worth? 50 dollars per year?

I guess most people would be willing to pay that amount in exchange for privacy.

People willing (and able) to pay $50/y for this have the unfortunate correlating characteristic of being far more valuable as advertising targets than the average person.

In other words: If you are willing to give me $50 for ad-free internet, that's going to cost you $100. And so on...

That may be so in a world without ad blocking.

In the world we have, even with money to spare people will stop visiting a site in preference to enabling ads. Especially as ads get ever more intrusive and destructive of the experience while use of ad blocking continues to rise. It's not solely to get content for free, it's mostly because the ads got so damn irritating and so high a percentage of screen space and page weight. To that they ad a triple shot of tracking so they can trace you all over the web.

Too many intrusive adverts is why many get rid of cable and terrestrial TV, or only listen to BBC radio.

So do content creators prefer some money from those people, or none at all?

The point is that these people will not be paying the ad networks; they will be paying the content creators ...

And my point is that content creators will prefer to be paid more by advertisers, one you've proven you have money to spare.

Once you start paying content creators directly (with the condition that there are no ads and no tracking), then ad networks have nothing to do with the whole situation.

matt4077 might be right actually; those who choose to pay to avoid ads are probably not broke and thus more valuable ad targets, so (some?) content creators will get greedy and double-dip by producing content steeped in product placements or equivalent. That, in turn, would undermine the idea and adoption by the willing-to-buy-out-ads segment would be low.

In-content ads are regulated in many places. You can't do it unless you explicitly mention that it is an ad.

I doubt even 10% of European citizens would pay even 5$ per year for that as long there are adblockers.

Now, if the content is worth it, that's different story. There have always been subscription based websites (e.g. forums with pay-to-upgrade schemes).

Why webmasters and advertisers haven't yet perfected and adopted server-side ad injections is beyond me.

> Why webmasters and advertisers haven't yet perfected and adopted server-side ad injections is beyond me.

Because then the advertisers have to trust the webmasters to actually show the ads and not inflate the numbers, etc