1. Online ads today are so bad they must be blocked
2. But blocking ads blocks revenue for sites we like
3. So we should pay for them more directly
4. But I'm not about to set up 100 different monthly subscriptions. These corporations are not trustworthy and I cannot monitor this many bills.
5. We need a solution to simplify money -> content -> creator transfer
6. There's been many attempts at that, but there's too many players who want the power and control that comes with wedging themselves in between consumers and creators.
7. So we're stuck.
There's no ethical reason for us to "pay" these scummy actors, including Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, after they destroyed all viable alternatives by giving away their products free and THEN add advertising.
As you intimate, there's also nothing intrinsically necessary to the advertising model for it to be served by different domains, with 3rd party cookies and third party javascript. Nor is it necessary to have auto-play videos, popups, etc. Even someone fairly benign like the Guardian is now infested with up-sells and adverts if you look at it without an adblocker.
So the sites brought it on themselves.
You want to support their ads, go ahead, but don't ask us to come up with the alternative model. You have no moral high ground to preach to us from, all these sites used a bait and switch to get on top. Right now if I look at facebook every 2 or 3 stories are adverts, where 5 years ago it was far less, and for google a huge chunk of the top of the results page, up to three results worth, are adverts.
None of these are clearly marked imo, nor are they necessary, they're making billions in profit. They can do it because they monopolized the market.
It's not a question they need to answer, that's the problem of the companies that caused this mess.
> Yet they still expect these websites to exist.
Not really, they just use what exists, not what they expect to exist.
This folk has an answer: display ads the ol' fashioned way, with a pair of <a> and <img> tags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblock_Plus#Controversy_over_...
> * In February 2013, an anonymous source accused Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant of offering to add his site's advertisements to the whitelist in return for one-third of the advertisement revenue.[68] In June 2013, blogger Sascha Pallenberg accused the developers of Adblock Plus of maintaining business connections to "strategic partners in the advertising industry", and called ABP a "mafia-like advertising network".[69] He alleged that Adblock Plus whitelisted all ads coming from "friendly" sites and subsidiaries, and promoted their product using fake reviews and pornography.[70] Faida responded to Pallenberg's accusations, stating that "a large part of the information concerning the collaboration with our partners is correct", but that the company did not see these industry connections as a conflict of interest.*
"We'll whitelist acceptable ads. Btw, acceptable means 'willing to pay us a kickback'".
The move on Adblock Plus did nothing to make me safer, so of course I ditched them for a more secure solution. Of course, it's Adblock Plus's goal and right to try to make a revenue, but I don't owe them the continued use of their product.
And I absolutely reject the premise that I owe every website that's willing to send a 200 OK response the right to run arbitrary javascript in my browser. If you don't want me 'mooching' your content, fine - put up a paywall.
Also, flattr and other micropayment sites could/would work. Just as patreon and other subscription methods.
After all paid-via-unskippable-ads is the inverse of consumed-without-payment. Both are the extremes of the spectrum and the majority of users probably would stop visiting/consuming if they were forced to look at the ads for a significant amount of time.
I mean TV channels probably spent hundreds of millions on trying to maximize ad time while keeping viewers. (And now YouTube too.)
But of course there will always be a segment that will be very bothered by ads. (Hence the success of Netflix.)
I for one certainly don't have that expectation. I understand sites have non-zero operating costs, and/or staffing and other expenses in order to create and serve interesting content.
If someone rolls out (without using the word blockchain or any derivative) a way of doing the web equivalent of .99 per track, no middlemen/Elsevier types, just 'pay the originating site for full permanent access to this page', I'll do that in a heartbeat.
I buy paper books and sit and enjoy them thoroughly... web content transparently priced with reasonable, honest rates get at least close to that style.
https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...
Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK): A Broadband Tax for the UK (2009)
https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-f...
Myself: Universal Payment Syndication (2014)
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
Joseph Stiglitz: "Knowledge as a Global Public Good"
http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343... (PDF) (pp 308-325)
If users don’t need an account to get the content and they still get ads with the paid account, what exactly are you offering in exchange for the payment?
The solution we'll get stuck with is an embedded webassembly browser rendering to canvas.
> Manage subscriptions of 10 plus websites manually
> Pay by your privacy
It is clear that both options suck, so people opt in to ad blockers instead. Legal options are just overpriced for the demand.
People often respond to this with "well, hobbyists make plenty of content for free," but the thing is that we benefit when our favorite hobbyists can make money from the craft and produce more work for us to enjoy instead of waiting around for their charity.
Though the growth of Patreon is a good step in the right direction, culturally. It shows a growing willingness to indeed pay content producers directly with small recurring transactions.
I'd prefer to just pay Brave e.g. $10/month and have it give out that money to sites I visit.
I use Firefox's built Enhanced Tracking Prevention, that some sites call "ad blocking" but in reality it is super easy to have ads that don't get blocked by it, just make them non-creepy.