The other point to be made here is that the average revenue per user for even the most successful advertising companies (e.g. Google) is less than $1/day. That's not a huge amount of money even for someone with a low income. (From a first-world perspective. Incomes are lower in other parts of the world, but so are advertising revenues from users there.)

So the amount you would have to pay to deliver the same revenues to creators as advertising does is not very much. Especially if we could cut out the middle man so that all of what you pay goes to the content creator.

That's the biggest problem we have right now. You have someone write a news article, a million people read it, it cost you maybe a thousand dollars to write (assuming it's well-researched and not garbage clickbait), so to recover your costs you need one tenth of one cent per user.

We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?

Fix that and you can sustainably pay <$300 and not have to see any ads all year.

> We need a payment system which makes transactions that small efficient. And it needs to be anonymous for the buyer, because the whole point is to get rid of the tracking, right?

Hopefully Monero will achieve this one day.

My monero investment is down so bad that a micro payment is all I will be able to afford

Monero is a good currency but a really bad investment. That's probably a good thing too. If its price remains stable relative to USD, we can start developing the habit of pricing everything in XMR instead. I've gotten paid in XMR for writing some quick code, it works pretty well. Now we just need to get people to sell oil barrels for XMR.

Man, that's really interesting

Looks like Monero hasn't been pumping or dumping quite as much as other cryptocurrencies, maybe that means its creators actually care about making it useful as currency rather than as a medium for ~~scams~~ "investments"

I'd love an ad-free future, but something tells me that there'll always just be too much pressure to make more ads. Hell, Amazon is pumping $10,000,000 per episode into a TV show that's arguably just a big ad for Amazon (subscribe to our TV service to watch this show, buy some socks and video games while you're here)

Yeah. The cryptocurrency space does have a lot of scams, especially coins created on top of ETH and BNB. However, there's a lot of good projects as well. Monero is everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. I think it's insane how people are wasting energy on bitcoin mining. That energy would be better spent securing Monero.

There will always be pressure to advertise. No matter what product or service you have or how profitable it is, you can always make even more money by selling your user's attention. That's why we need technology that makes it impossible to advertise to us. A browser extension that deletes elements, a video filter that deletes brands, augmented reality glasses that deletes billboards.

The sole advantage that I'll grant ad-funded services is that they tend to far more open-access than the alternatives. Bill Gates and homeless people get the same features from Facebook. The rich subsidize the poor without ever having to actually open their wallet.

Ads are still a net negative, but it's worth considering that requiring payment will price some people out, because the poor aren't usually subsidized with paid services.