For me the first big disagreement begins with asking for what's the alternative. I don't think there needs to be an alternative. I think ads are largely responsible for the sorry state of the seo spammed web where finding what you want can be a complete nightmare. (It costs almost nothing to run a website, and if you spam enough ~zero cost sites loaded with ads and affiliate links, you can probably make a buck. This prospect just encourages spam and low effort sites.)
I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.
Just to add a little data from personal experience... About 4 years back I ran a small study in grad school where I was trying to find some alternative to ads. For a survey I basically asked "how much would you be willing to pay to view websites without ads".
I bucketed the responses to something along the lines of greater than $1, $.75, $.5, $.25, $.01 or nothing.
What I was (secretly) hoping was that people would be willing to pay something like a cent for a page view, since I was building a prototype for a more user friendly anti-adblocker, seeing that many websites started to deploy their own back then, and hating that there was no middle ground.
However, what I found was that people were unwilling to pay anything for a page view. I think the author actually mentions this as a failed alternative model.
Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else. Even if it means that the cost of serving ads is actually higher (in terms of bandwidth) than what it would cost to just pay a cent or two cents or whatever for pageviews.
> Point being it really seems like people have decided/agreed that they prefer the ad model to anything else.
I'm not sure how you mean this but what you say comes dangerously close to implying that people want ads. That may be true if you force them into a false dichotomy (pay or have ads).
I think it's more just that people don't want to pay. If it's on the web, they read it for free, period. If it's not on the web, then it isn't and they don't read it. If you look at it from this perspective, ads aren't even part of the discussion. I think people prefer the "someone pays for it" model to anything else.
The dichotomy is only real if you construct a hypothetical scenario about some ad-or-paywall site that absolutely must exist and that people absolutely want to read and for which no alternative can emerge if that site stops existing.
If you remove pay models, a vast majority of the internet will just disappear. (I think you) in a previous comment mention that it is 'cheap' to run a site, which is generally true on a per user basis for primarily text sites. But cheap != free.
I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or indirectly to be able to use those services.
That's not what they were saying though. It's one way to read it, sure, but another way is "most content on the web is so low value that if it ceased existing users would not care".
Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.
A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.
So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.
Most of the time I browse on my phone. If I'm on e.g. HN and I click a link, and I get a 3/4 page cookie notification, or if Intercom pops up a bubble over half the phone, I usually just close the page and don't bother. I think this backs up what you are saying, so much content isnt pay or watch ads, its "I'll glance at it but really I dont care enough about it even to dismiss a popup". This is very different from physical or service purchases. As I said in another comment, its "browsing".
I think you're missing that content creators (whether they be small or large) need to be able to subsist off of their work.
This is especially true if we want high quality content. So the dichotomy is only false if you assume people are willing to accept "stop consuming content" which, by and large, they aren't.
The best content I get these days are from people who create content for free (hobbyists with personal sites, discussions on web forums, ad free podcasts, etc.). Getting rid of ads would make this content a lot easier to find, as it would get rid of all the SEO spam that clutters up the internet at the moment.
I wholeheartedly agree, but we are probably 'unusual' in that regard. 'Normal' is probably something (depressingly) closer to 'from #influencers who are like omg so down to Earth in their product recommendations and #lifehacks'...
How many content creators are fully supported by ads? All the material I read says that is probably the worst way of trying to earn a living as a content creator.
Seems to me that creators are getting a dreadful deal from the current set up and that FB etc are the ones gaining massively.
To all but one of the YouTubers I watch, I get the impression that anything it pays is at most secondary to them; they're not optimising for payout because they're not 'trying to earn a living'.
Clough42 for example is a software engineer, and makes metalworking & 3D-printing videos that I enjoy watching; he certainly gets ad money (O(100ks) subscribers) but I'd guess he spends more on equipment, tools, etc. (and would despite the income) - certainly if you counted lost earnings from 'he could be doing contract work instead' - because that's not the point, it's a hobby, and a secondary hobby is putting it on YouTube for me (and millions of others) to enjoy.
(I'm sort of hesitant to single someone out - especially someone who's probably on HN, heh - but I that's the impression I get anyway. If it's not totally true for him I'm sure it is for others.)
No, they don't. Creative jobs have always been boom or bust, following a power law where ten people earn a living directly off of it and everyone else waits tables by day and hopes to someday catch a break. That was fine for centuries. The world didn't collapse prior to the invention of widescale cross-site tracking of user behavior to create intelligent targeted ads, and I'm not sure it was worse for "content creators," either. Maybe they're just being old and grumpy, but the actual most talented people in creative industries seem to yearn for yesteryear when they were allowed to actually be creative and all the major publishers and studios weren't in an unwinnable death race to the bottom with Netflix and Amazon seemingly generating true crime docs and superhero stories by algorithm.
As for quality, it's all opinion, I guess, but the only form that seems to have gotten better recently is prestige television, but even there I'd say it so far peaked around 2010. Film and pop music peaked in the 60s and 70s. Instrumental music, literature, and painting peaked centuries ago. Artists have created perfectly good art for as long as humans have existed without the need to track their consumers private behavior to develop targeted ad profiles.
I always assumed that this was an artifact of recording technology: if you can record a movie or music, then you can have a handful of actors and musicians service the entire world, but without that each city needs its local musicians and theater troupes. If that's correct then we've been in this state for maybe 1 century.
For writers though it's been centuries, since writing enabled distribution of content in many places.
I don't think you could expect people to start paying by page for the "content" on the web as it is now after 25 years of evolution under an ad funded model.
People pay for an internet connection, and e.g. will pay more to get a faster connection or higher quota. There is value, its just not in the casual attention model that the ad driven internet has developed. Even the term "browser" implies how we interact with most content, and to me doesn't evoke "I'll pay by the page"
A partial parallel is radio. Would you pay for local FM radio without ads? Unlikely, but some might pay for satellite radio because of the bundled content and national accessibility. And even more would pay for spotify. These are not just the old radio with ads swapped for direct cash, they provide something better. Paid internet will have to be the same.
I don't care one bit if ad supported sites just vanish, no need for an alternative. Yes please, clean up the web. What's left is the stuff that is worth enough for people to pay for.