
Ask HN: How do you pay for content with money (not privacy/attention/etc.)? - kerkeslager
When I talk about ad and tracker blocking, I get accused a lot of not supporting content providers, which I find puzzling, because in all probability, I pay more for content, and more of it goes to the content producers.<p>Still, I sometimes find it difficult to find a way to ethically pay for the content I consume, so I&#x27;m interested in hearing what strategies other people use to pay for content with money rather than privacy&#x2F;attention&#x2F;etc..
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kerkeslager
Here's what I do:

Music: This is probably what I consume the most of. I have a physical music
collection which is about half vinyl and half CDs. I'm slowly selling off my
vinyl and rebuying the albums on CD. I have a small collection of MP3s (small
enough to fit in an unpaid Dropbox account) which were purchased from bands
too small-time to have released physical media. If the music was released
after ~2000, I probably bought the physical media new, to support the artist--
older stuff can be difficult to find new.

News: If I go directly to a news site, it's Mother Jones[1] or Pro Publica[2],
and I donate $10 to each monthly. If I click through from an aggregator (such
as HN) I view the content with browser-based ad-blocking. For sites that give
a few free reads, I use the free reads, but don't make any attempt to get
more. For sites that block me from reading with ad blocking, I just leave. I
view this as fair use.

Books: If I had every paperback I've purchased, my collection would be huge.
But after I read books, I only keep them if they're so good that I intend to
re-read them (probably 20 titles in this category) or if they are reference
books (probably another 40 titles in this category). Otherwise I give them
away to friends, donate them to a library, or make the hard decision to trash
them.

Academic papers: Many are free online. If not, writing to the author almost
always procures a PDF or DOC file--academics receive little income from
publishing, and are often surprised and happy to hear someone is interested in
their work. Sometimes the author is dead, however. In general I have little
objection to using SciHub, especially when research is government-funded.

TV Shows: I pay for a few streaming services (Netflix/Amazon).

Movies: Movies I tend to see at a local movie theater, or (less frequently)
pay a one-time rental for on Amazon. I have some DVDs but don't own a DVD
player, so I've only kept the DVDs that would be hard to obtain again.

Small independently produced video: The vast majority of video I consume is
shorter videos (usually related to rock climbing). Where possible, I donate,
usually through Patreon, but this is a spot where a lot of people don't
actually give this ability. I've bought a few products (books, mostly) from
video producers (where they produced the products themselves) but this is even
less common than donations. So I don't have a perfect solution here.

Independent review sites (i.e. Consumer Reports): This one is a tough one.
These sites are important to me (I see these as the user-serving, superior
alternative to advertising for product discovery) but many depend on referrer
links, and I tend to buy locally. I've made $1 donations a few times where
that was possible, but it isn't always, and I don't use any one review site
frequently enough to justify a subscription. So I'd be interested to hear
strategies for this.

[1] [https://www.motherjones.com/](https://www.motherjones.com/)

[2] [https://www.propublica.org/](https://www.propublica.org/)

