>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

So be it.

>Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.

>Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.

Lots of speculation here, as if word of mouth didn't exist. Why is it so necessary that a brand tells me to buy things? Don't people have other ways to reach out to their audience that doesn't invade literally every public sphere, from billboards to websites?

>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.

In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run.

Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value of their content to their audience.

It also means that people would have a lot less access to information about what's going on. I wouldn't subscribe to a single newspaper or magazine if it cost me money. I would guess that a lot of the people I know would do the same.

Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time instead.

We're already saturated with information. Even if 99% less filtered through paywalls that'd be more than enough to satiate anyone's needs.

It would be interesting to study the content creators with the highest patreon revenue and see what kind of content they're creating. Is it Outrage of the Day echo chamber content, how to DIY, storytelling, or something else. That might give us some insight into what a advertising free content creation world would look like.

Seems to me just as likely we'd get a third option: Free journalism paid for by the super-rich and large corporations.

If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.

> Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you.

Umm, I think this is largely the reality for niche products right now, with advertising. I don't see ads for niche products, and I don't see producers of niche products paying for ads because a small campaign wouldn't reach the right audience and a large campaign would be too expensive for a niche product.

This is exactly the problem that highly targeted advertising solves. I see ads for relatively niche products fairly often.

YMMV. I don't recall seeing anything remotely relevant, so maybe it's not a working solution.