What if it’s not so cheap, though? I think the problem is that the ad-tech industry offers publishers more than the median reader will pay, and does so reliably, while all of the alternatives mean they have to convince a whole ton of people who’ve been trained their entire lives that the internet is free to start paying non-trivial sums for previously free content.

I would like to live in a world where we do pay for what we use but I’m not sure how we get there by now.