> The problem is that for YouTube to get that payment, I have to give them, and other ad networks a major view in to my whole life.

Wait... does that mean, Google could offer "DoubleClick Premuim", where I pay to not see any DoubleClick ads whatsoever, anywhere on the web, but the websites I visited would still get their funding? I think I'd pay $10/mo for that.

Don't fall for that scam. If you pay for such a service, it only increases the value of your attention even further. You're clearly demonstrating you have enough disposable income to pay their extortion fees. It only makes them sell to you even more.

There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you. Someone will at some point realize they're leaving money on the table and the policy will be reverted.

They have no limits. They'd put ads under our eyelids if they could. In our dreams. The only way to deal with such people is to block their ads unconditionally and with extreme prejudice.

> There is no context where a rational businessman would choose not to advertise to you.

...except, the businessman wanting to show me an advert doesn't have a choice. The website chose DoubleClick; I'm paying DoubleClick not to show me any ads. Websites that don't choose DoubleClick either get adblocked, or I avoid, thus making less money from me.

There is some expected value that DoubleClick will get from me in the course of a month; that's not infinite, and if it's a reasonable fee (like, $12/mo) then they'll get a lot more from me than if I use an ad-blocker.

Then they realize you're paying about $150 a year to avoid ads. That fact alone increases the value of your attention. Thus you gotta pay them even more money to avoid ads. Which increases the value of your attention further. At some point the value exceeds what you're willing to pay and it's back to ads. Then they start selling your personal information to the highest bidder which includes the fact you have enough disposable income and a willingness to pay not to be bothered. The only possible outcome is rent seekers pouring out of the woodwork to try and grab a little of your sweet disposable income.

The only way to deal with these people is to reduce their profits to zero, not come up with ways to increase them. We simply decide that ads are unacceptable and that's the end of it. They either adapt or die.

> That fact alone increases the value of your attention.

OK, but does it increase my value to more than $150/year? I mean, just how much are people willing to pay for me to see ads?

I mean ultimately, if someone is paying $5 to show me an ad, either they're going to go bankrupt, or it's going to be pretty darn good. If paying $12 once means I'm on the "costs $5 to show this person ads" list, then that's probably still worth it. :-)

Who knows? Maybe if the value of your attention increases too much they'll socialize it among themselves or something. Instead of 1 company paying for an ad slot, 10 of them will band together and pay 1/10th of the cost to share the same slot instead. I'm sure they'll find a way.

Pay-per-view creates a perverse incentive to make SEO noise and make it more difficult to find what you want. You would be mostly paying to make your life worse. Better to just block ads, encourage and help others to block ads, and hope those sites die.

I certainly understand the perverse incentive, but that's already the incentive we're working under. And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content? How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?

If everyone did as you suggest, spammy SEO sites will be the last to die, because the effort invested to make them is so much lower than the effort of quality content.

> And how do you propose we fairly compensate people for the value they've created when making content?

> How can we support artists, journalists, and so on to do the work that we enjoy?

We either pay them before the work is completed or in an ongoing manner to support their activities. Patronage. Crowdfunding. Plenty of people seem to be achieving success via platforms like Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. This is ethical.

If they're worthwhile and looking to be paid, you pay them. If they're not worth paying, they go out of business, and SNR improves.

From what I've seen on youtube, almost all professional "content creators" make very shallow entertainment (or thinly veiled ads), which at least personally usually just makes me feel disappointed in myself for having wasted my time if I indulge.

Google Contributor did offer something like that for a while.

Google has repeatedly experimented with that. It always fails because the amount advertisers subsidize your internet experience is more like on the order of hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, not ten.

Yep I agree, the ad supported Internet was a mistake and we should never have stopped paying for the services we use. I just hope that these changes will increase people's willingness to pay, then other platforms who aren't owned by the largest ad broker might have a chance.