The elephant in the room here is the assumption that newspapers or other media that rely only on ads to survive should automatically have a viable business model just because they had a viable model with printed media.
Clearly, this is not the case. One can't adblock printed media, but can certainly adblock websites.
The solution? Find a better business model. For example, stack overflow uses non-intrusive, pertinent ads to entice people to white list the site, and separate revenue streams like a job board to keep the site running.
I understand that this might sound simplistic. I am perfectly aware of how hard this problem is to fix -- however the world moves in the direction dictated by the big economic trends. Websites have almost zero variable cost -- most cost is fixed and does not scale as pageviews increase -- so economics tells us that competition will drive the value of a pageview to zero.
For starters, I'd love to see online newspapers run ads that behave like print ads. This would mean they show the same ad for everyone (not an ad that the ad network thinks will match your interests,) the ad does not move or play audio, the ad does not track views or clicks, the ad is delivered to you by the same infrastructure that delivers the article (that is, from the same image and JavaScript CDNs, no external resources,) the ads are not overly distracting from the main content and each ad is vetted for misleading and false claims.
These ads would be harder to block, mainly because of the CDN thing, but maybe not as many people would want to go out of their way to block them. readthedocs.io sometimes runs ads that fit this criteria and, at least on my machine, uBlock doesn't block them yet.
> Maybe sites like Stack Overflow have 0 variable cost but this is more of an exception.
Interesting, how so? I find it difficult to imagine any media site that, once they produced a piece of content, has to pay any other substantial cost as they get more views.
In other words: doubling up page views for the Guardian does not mean doubling up the costs of producing the articles. That's what I mean by "substantially zero variable cost".
Clearly, this is not the case. One can't adblock printed media, but can certainly adblock websites.
The solution? Find a better business model. For example, stack overflow uses non-intrusive, pertinent ads to entice people to white list the site, and separate revenue streams like a job board to keep the site running.
I understand that this might sound simplistic. I am perfectly aware of how hard this problem is to fix -- however the world moves in the direction dictated by the big economic trends. Websites have almost zero variable cost -- most cost is fixed and does not scale as pageviews increase -- so economics tells us that competition will drive the value of a pageview to zero.