I already hate it with Music and Video content: With music, I pay Youtube Music, but they don't have all the artists I like. I would have to pay for Spotify, Tidal and Youtube Music to get close to it. This means paying $30 USD per month

With video... I pay $70 USD for my cable company (HBO+Star+misc-crap) plus $13 USD for Netflix, plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there), plus $13 Amazon Prime, plus $10 for the local Netflix-like crap in my country (for some local shows).

That means $118 USD for video only, which is 14% of the average income in my country ($843 USD). Imagine if I had to pay $10 dollars a month for each of the internet services we use?

$10 Gmail $10 google $10 Reddit $10 HackerNews $10 Youtube $10 Linkedin $10 Facebook $10 twitter $10 Whatsapp $10 LiChess $10 Slack $10 Samsung Health $10 Google Maps $10 Podcast Republic $10 CBS News (The only US channel I like for news) $10 Home Workout $10 Discord

And that's at the top of my head, it will be $180 USD, or 21% of the average income of someone in my country.

If that happened, the internet will become "a place for the rich" and pretty much only the north emisphere will use it. Yeah, ads suck... but their are a necessary evil to "monetize" users that are just not monetizable any other way.

Your point is a good one but let me offer some tweaks that make paying for stuff not look as bleak.

1. Bundling multiple subscriptions is a long-time practice and if more services were paid offerings we'd likely all buy some bundle that gave us most of what we wanted at a reasonable price.

2. Paying for services will reduce the number of services around... which may be a good thing when so many offerings are sub-par.

3. With more paid offerings, we will be more deliberate about how we spend our time, which is what advertising-based models make us forget we are really spending. And as you age you realize that the time you spent watching ad-supported drivel was more expensive than if you had just paid directly for the things you really needed and spent the rest of your time on things that matter - friends, family, experiences, learning etc.

>> plus $12 for disney plus (wife likes a couple shows there)

Sh, it's OK, everyone does it, you are not alone :P

You're right - but I find that strange. Most of us are not angry about the pay model for groceries or haircuts. A smaller - but still large - fraction of us are okay paying for other zero-marginal-cost goods like software as well. I wonder why we are so attached to free content online. Maybe because of the historical television model that's been mentally transferred to the internet?

Its just the fact that people are used to free content, so the idea of paying for it is foreign.

If groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.

That's absurd. People need groceries. If the National Enquirer went to a paid subscription model or disappeared entirely nobody would riot.

> That's absurd. People need groceries.

Thus: if groceries used to be free, but suddenly cost money, people would riot.

Arguably: why would people riot about not-free Youtube?

See also this Planet Money episode about formerly-free doughnuts. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...

I think it's just because we've been conditioned to expect free content online.

Free services like YouTube have provided me with an immense amount of value, but I would still be hesitant to pay for them unless I absolutely had to.

Was the web supported by ads before Google? I don't remember.

Does the web have to be supported by ads? If the web was a non-profit service, supported by public funds, managed by academic institutions for example, would we miss 90% of the content that's basically sponsored by someone who wants to sell something?

From my point of view it looks like the web is a giant advertising machine built on top of something that could be ... not a giant advertising machine. Still from my POV, it just happens that the big players on the web are suppoting ads because that's where their revenue comes from and if they weren't the big players, then we wouldn't have a web of ads.

So basically we're not paying for ads that we wouldn't be paying for if google didn't run the web.

I'm probably too nostalgic, but that's what the web used to be... and it was so much better. Most of the content we would lose I wouldn't miss at all. Clickbait and buzzfeed style sites. Already I'm paying for a lot of sites that actually do reporting, for instance, so I already feel like the content of real value is already for-pay or produced completely for free by enthusiasts and academics.

I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.

Most of that outcry would be from terrible media outlets who would have to shut down. 95% of the things I click on I wish I hadn't. They would still get an impression (if I weren't adblocked to the teeth.) They're trash that keeps me from the information that I want, and matchmaking stalkery ad markets are the reason for them.

The content people really value is already being paid for.

I didn't hear any outrage at all when several newspapers transitioned to a pay model and threw up a paywall. The parties most upset were the newspapers themselves.

I foresee micropayments being extremely common place in the future. Something like a digital wallet browser extension. And instead of paying 5p to watch a video, you will instead pay 5p to skip 3 minute ads.

This would be an absolute nightmare experience. It would force you to make small decisions about money constantly. You would have to constantly make the decision "Do I want to pay some money now or do I suffer through this ad? How much have I paid lately? It feels like it might be adding up? But I really can't be bothered, maybe I'll just pay. I feel bad about paying so much though..."

It would be utterly exhausting, which is why it will not happen.

People have been saying this for decades. I don’t see a way for this to happen that is both more convenient to users and not open to all manner of automated attacks that would be difficult if not impossible to track down.

Ad fraud is already a huge problem, as are things like ransomware. Micropayments would just give bad actors a direct line to your wallet.

You can allow certain domains to automatically withdraw from your bitcoin wallet and set limits to how much they can withdraw. This is not a technical problem but more of a marketing/adoption one. There are very smart people working on these: https://socket.money/

And what happens when one of those domains gets hacked and a malicious script injected into their code that takes advantage of a 0-day in the browser to siphon the cash? Not at all a far-fetched situation as it’s how ransomware works today.

The articles said that the industry has been talking about micropayments for 25 years and says it's hard. I think the real issue is that no large-ish tech organization has any incentive to invest in micropayments.

Digital cash saw no uptake for decades either, between Chaum and Satoshi. This may turn out similarly (and it's not as if it's implausible for digital cash to be a prerequisite for micropayments to take off, in practice).

I'd be happiest with a daily subscription model.

It wouldn't happen at once.

I wonder whether the gradual switch would need to be made possible through something similar to a micropayment subscription model, which is non publisher specific.

I don't want to commit to subscriptions for 5+ publications, but I'd happily buy a days access occasionally. This feels much more akin to buying a newspaper in the old world.

I think we'd end up seeing positive changes. Especially the end of content producers being held to ransom by advertisers and commercial pressures.