I'll often ask people with ad blockers what sites they pay for and depressingly often they say they don't pay for any. Coming as no surprise to anyone that has worked with customers before, what people say they'll pay for and what they actually will pay for are very different.
From a user perspective, ads are all downside, no upside. I pay for my content and I use an adblocker, and that's the only way to survive on the internet these days, because the ruthless pursuit of profit by short-sighted surveillance capitalists has ruined advertising as anything approaching an ethical business model.
I don’t feel entitled to any content either. However, ad-driven sites are offering the content for free. I think framing this as not “entitled” to the content is misleading and assumes the point of view of the advertiser rather than the consumer. We know they’d like it if we saw and considered their ads, but we are under no obligation, legal, ethical, or otherwise, to read/watch/listen to ads, none whatsoever. And the content is being offered to you and served regardless of your reception of the ads. They are actually trying to tell you that you are entitled to the content. Content makers want to get paid, but many of them would prefer you consume their content and ignore the ads than not consumer their content.
Unfortunately there is no business model alternative to ads that will keep the web and the economy going. If everyone charged money and stopped servings ads all at once, the web would collapse. Ads aren’t going away, and these sites still won’t learn what you want them to even if we stop using them.
Otherwise I don't want to be tracked profusely. Ethics is sorely missing in online advertising.
One brings this ugly topic up, that ads keep sites running, and are showered by comments of people saying exactly what you said. Those comments get praise and lots of upvotes. Everyone pats themselves on the back.
But when you are on the other side of the equation, the one dependent on ad views and/or subscriptions, the numbers unequivocally show that people are totally full of shit. That they are just virtue signalling to receive praise and to push the skeleton back in the closet.
Again, not calling you out personally, I believe you do support creators. But I have done this song and dance many many times, and it always goes the same way.
I pay for many many subscriptions for content I like. Also, I don't see any "virtue signalling" anywhere. I don't want ads because they are hostile and not in my best interest. They significantly lower the quality of my life. It's as simple as that.
Everyone says they pay to support, very few people actually do.
Just look at how it is a matter of course to post an archive.is link anytime a pay walled article is posted. It's so pervasive and wide spread that people don't even think about it.
I still have a few subscriptions, especially if they send it out on a dead tree, but with the nature of the internet it's hazardous to not use an ad blocker. I've come to appreciate when publications run reminders that they are, in fact, also people who need to eat, and i try to make up for what i take from the trough by buying swag or sending a check if they take donations. But i get that there's not an enviable business plan on the other side of that equation. It's an ongoing evolution.
I'd place the shift happening earlier with early web portals. People made (or were coerced by their ISP) web portals their home page. The model of portals was show people headlines with direct links to the articles.
Hyperlinks are fundamental to the web so it's not like portals were doing something bad. It is just a model that's difficult to monetize for the destination site. More difficult than a traditional magazine or newspaper since the site only gets paid per actual impression vs paid per square inch from potential impressions estimated by circulation.
RSS readers were more about the democratization of portals since a site feed let the end user build their own "portal" from their collection of feeds. In terms of traffic patterns an RSS user was pretty similar to a web portal user, just a visitor that dropped in on some deep link and didn't necessarily hit any additional pages.
Ad based businesses are as bad as door to door life insurance scammers, multi level scammers, etc.
In short, find a job that doesn't require damaging other people.
/Forgot to mention, watching ads without buying the advertised product simply decreases ad yield over time and therefore it even wastes productivity for 0 return in the long run./
What numbers?
Where can I pay to replace ads with something that isn't orders of magnitude more expensive? Basically any single-site subscription I've seen fails that test. If you're citing that kind of subscription, then that evidence doesn't work here.
For every thing else I use adblockers.
In any marketing research it is well-known that what people say they would pay for and what they actually pay for are two different things. Hence also the mantra about MVPs and going to market as soon as possible.
But specifically on AnandTech and "written journalism", I think they are right about the "written" part. These days the topic and hardware reviews are all over Youtube.
Meanwhile the numbers show where the users actually are. I pay for YouTube, Telegram, and Nebula, self host Matrix, use and run Bluesky infrastructure, and a few other things but I'm the first to admit I'm in the minority. Not only that but it's time consuming! Meanwhile in tech discourse everyone is using Kagi for everything and "it's a breath of fresh air" or whatever.
If you visit with an ad blocker, they say “please disable your blocker or subscribe for $3/year. Hit the subscribe button and you can Apple Pay and be reading a 100% ethically as free article in seconds.
Obviously transaction costs totally suck at prices that low, but one transaction a year helps I’m sure.
There are lots of sites (AnandTech being a prime example) I don't visit often enough to justify the usual monthly subscription cost.
Per-article pricing with no registration would be ideal (yet another cryptocurrency use case that never materialized) but as you say, transaction fees make that a non starter.
I don't really have a better idea besides automated micropayments, which nobody has managed yet, crypto doesn't count,, so I guess we'll have to live with the current situation?
The fundamentally corrupt business model has grown big enough to reach its own tail and has been happily chomping on it for a while. Now it's getting to the juicy parts.
Maybe it is just paranoia, they never asked permission to access the accelerometer, but it happened so consistently I wondered if they had something that would detect the motion that comes before a click and shifted the layout deliberately.
In sense that they get paid thru a Patreon/Ko-Fi or something, because these hobbyists likely still want to be compensated.
And I never will. Sites should offer a pay option, not require that their users submit their data to intrusive tracking all over the web. If no one is willing to pay for their stuff, well I'm sorry that they are so bad at creating good content.
While strictly true, it almost certainly would only be a tiny fraction. Probably not far off from the small fraction that would visit their site without ad-blocking.
I know people don't like hearing it, but the "I never want to see an advertisement again...and I don't have to" mentality that exists, especially within anandtechs tech minded demographic, does have material downsides.
I'm not saying you shouldn't block ads, but I know 99% of you reading this have never whitelisted a single domain.
Now crucify me for pulling a skeleton out of the closet.