I'm pretty frustrated by advertising too, and some of it is particularly egregious, but at the moment, there is really no other way for many publishers to get paid.

I'm curious, how many services do you subscribe to and pay for content? I pay for a few ad free resources, but certainly a lot of the sites I enjoy don't get my $$.

Just as an example: I read some dev newsletters, they include a block of paid-for job postings. Highly relevant with the content. Together with the occasional sponsored post link (also still relevant content) this appears to fund them just fine.

This isn't "ad free" but it's close enough in my opinion. There's a huge gulf between contextually relevant content curated by the creators and the kind of shite that ad networks push.

Great morally charged argument, but I am not sure how you expect content creators to monetize.

Well, to be blunt, in my humble opinion more than 90% of "content creators" trying to monetize their content with ads currently produce content of so low quality, that world would be a better place without their content. So if my ad blocker helps any of those to change their career, I am happy.

Even with ad monetization, if their content is of no use, they will disappear if they survive on said ad monetization. Content creation on the web is hard enough to suffer from removing the major monetization avenue without a suitable alternative.

Charge money, either directly for the content, or indirectly in the form of patronage or a service or other business you run.

Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting. I can see a decentralized crypto application evolving around this usecase

> Yep, these exist as alternatives as of now, but require an explicit payment step which might cause more friction than ads.

Payment from one user produces more revenue than showing ads to hundreds of users. That should be multiplied in to any analysis of friction.

> I think a service that allows for website usage based payments, a Spotify/Apple News for websites would be interesting.

There have been many attempts to do that, none of which have succeeded. One major problem: they tend to track all your web activity, and the kinds of people interested in services like this are very much the kinds of people who don't want to be tracked. Another problem: it's easier to convince people to pay for a specific source of content than to amorphously pay for "various content".

That's not really my problem, is it? It is the content creator's problem.