> They can find other business models other than advertisement.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.
You're arguing that speech should earn a living, which sounds like asserting everyone has the right to patronage.
Just as most musicians or artists have to have a day job, so do most authors when they start. That's been true even for "political" speech: for about as long as people have had things to say, forms of self-subsidized pamphleteering have existed. In the 1990s, hobbyists were most of the web, enough to be able to kickstart a wikipedia.
Self-publishing still works today, thanks to platforms like ghost.org at $9/month that also give an onramp from free to patronage.
I'm saying it sucks that the majority of periodical writing has succumbed to race-to-the-bottom clickbait and adflooding.
Newspapers and magazines from three decades ago certainly weren't perfect, but on average they were a whole lot better than modern news sites, and I don't see how we can ever get back to that situation. I don't know what the solution is, but I can see a problem when it's punching me in the face.
I agree that ads are basically here to stay, in one form or another. And that most people arguing that the internet could migrate towards another model are probably wrong (people want free stuff, and a lot of people don't even mind ads sadly enough...). But I think that the user agent (the browser) shouldn't care at all about the sustainability of businesses or how viable blocking ads are for tech businesses. It should just do what's best for the user, or at least give the option to do that.
They're calculating with EUR 0.1 per user per month for targeted advertising.
The "Pur Abo" (EUR 4-5 per month per site) are thus 40 times more profitable.
The advertising has become mostly a mechanism to pressure readers into paying.
The question is, can you convince roughly 1/40 of your readers to pay 5 bucks a month if you don't use targeted advertising as the "threat"?
Maybe, just maybe, non-targeted advertising would already be enough? Many people pay to get rid of ads, not of surveillance, after all...
Seen recently few sites which blocked access unless you agreed for vicious tracking - so much for convincing readers, I guess.
I'm afraid that it's a new trend to paywall everything and give user a quite harmful choice of being tracked if it won't pay.
Few years ago there was an agreement in Poland between major media outlets to put an unified paywall system but it was abandoned quite fast. That was still before these vicious tracking techniques and cookie banners. People simply didn't want to pay for the access. Their tagline was "Do you value good journalism?" and it was memed out because the quality of these paid materials was considered as low. Many people complained that it's not that much different from stuff available for free. Others raised an argument that access to the information on the Internet should be free and they didn't want to spend money on this. Discussion happen, taking on paid content in general but whole thing fizzled out just like that paywall system.
Shouldn't you be happy with paywalling, and with these experiments at monetizing content in ways other than ads?
But as I've always said, the staunchly "anti-advertising"/"information should be free"/"the web would have far more high-quality information if it was fully free" people, not you specifically, but most people in this thread, just feel entitled to other people's labor, for free. Content creators know. Most of the people bitchin' about ads are willing to pay you zilch. They still very much want your content, though. Story as old as time. Just strictly regulate any data-collection and data-selling, that's the real problem.
Well that's exactly what we've been seeing these recent years right?
And it's also the subject of the article whether that's even legal. Nobody disputes the legality of an actual paywall. But whether the "consent" given in face of an "aggressive tracking vs payment" choice is actual legally considered consent in the sense of the GDPR, that's exactly what's being sorted out in court now.
It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down.
All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax/license funded media would still be around and assuming that the free market is actually a thing, companies would emerge to plug the holes left be the clickbait sites, at a price.
As it stands we're seeing those with the means paying for actual content and everyone else is just getting absolute garbage.
msn.com is my favorite example, why is that still around? Most of the ads are actual scams, all article link to other sites, which are equally scammy. Why? Because it makes Microsoft money and they do not care about their users getting scammed, as long as they get their cut.
I don't think ads should be the main way we fund content online, it's clearly not working anymore. The ad space has become the product and whatever content remains is just enough to trick people to going to the site and clicking a link or two. The content is no longer about enlightening or even entertaining, it's about trapping people in some twisted hedonic treadmill.
It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?
That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently.
I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.
The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.
I don't like online ads and the web they've created.
Society is full of predators. In the beginning, people got eaten in the jungle, and today they get monitored to learn their desires and then shown pictures of things they want. How do you know you're not being manipulated? Getting you to care and be concerned about things you're powerless to change is what the system did to you. Power is focus which means people are disempowered by getting them to focus their attention on things that don't matter. Advertisers normally need to pay cash money to buy someone's attention but you gave yours up for free. If everyone else is watching ads, then you're watching them watch ads. You're not any more free than they are. The simple fact of the matter is you won't be able to save others from this system, because you haven't even saved yourself.
Which people? Anyone who tells me I should care about people in general, I always assume it's an attempt at manipulation, because it's an illogical way of thinking.
News is a narcotic that, like ads and social media, preys on human weakness. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the purveyors of news would partner with purveyors of ads, similar to how casinos like to partner with alcohol and tobacco companies.
You mean poor news, right? There is such a thing as news, coming from reputable sources, at least, as reputable as a friend of a friend. We can agree to start from the position knowing all news information is biased, but if you still end up with that view, where is the learning coming from?
News isn't just biased. Modern technology gives us the power to get news from the source. In the past, a reporter would report on something that happened to a person. Today, that person can just post what happened to them on Twitter. Where do you think journos get their information from? The only reason to have another layer is to curate, decipher, and explain the raw information. That means applying bias. In fact it means news is bias in today's world, which is fine if you're aligned with the person doing it. For example, internal newsletters at companies are a great source of information, because your interests are intertwined. But you might not necessarily feel that way when it comes to media organizations that are mouthpieces of the state. Algorithms like Twitter are a much better system, because the worst bias they can inject is curation. They can't do spin and they can't assign meaning. At least not if you're only looking at the raw feeds. If you limit it to "Following" then it can't curate either, so the platform is capable of providing a small corner we can choose to be in that has zero bias other than your own.
I don't get your point. You are describing a world I do not take part in, I think for myself. And make adjustments appropriate to me. Your points are mostly circular and decidedly lacking in irony. I repeat, if what you say is so true, how do you learn? It sounds as if the barest of truth is out of reach, no matter what. How do I thus gauge the content of your words?
If by truth you mean facts, then most news is factual. Non-facts are easy to disprove. News is about glomming beliefs and emotion onto facts, similar to how advertisements get attached to web pages. If you're looking for truth, look to math.
That's not what news is at all. That's biased news. And not facts either. You might be confused with talking about how one projects feelings on to stories, filter internally, and, inevitably, bias them all by oneself.
The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can.
Lots of sites turned to shitty ads and clickbait because it makes lots of money, but I've followed some passionate writers and journalists who decided to stick to their guns and focus on quality content with a reasonable subscription price.
I don't follow any of them anymore, because they all either want out of business or gave up and switched to advertising hell.