> Currently the internet would not exist without the ad-supported business model.
In it's current form, yes. However, I'm not so sure that everybody here would agree that "the web today" is fundamentally better than the web ten years ago, technological advances aside. Everybody smelling gold and starting a blog to mindlessly shill for products in hopes of getting a commission, super low quality texts written/generated/spinned entirely for SEO reasons to place ads between the paragraphs etc doesn't come to mind when I ask myself "what could be better on the web?" If those things disappear tomorrow, I don't think a lot of us would miss them. We'd notice them being gone because it might feel like being able to breath freely after a strong cold, but I don't think many would miss them.
> But it will take a while until we start paying for news again, for example.
Plenty of people pay for news. They won't pay for Gawker or Buzzfeed though. I don't think that's a problem for anybody not invested in or working for those companies.
In it's current form, yes. However, I'm not so sure that everybody here would agree that "the web today" is fundamentally better than the web ten years ago, technological advances aside. Everybody smelling gold and starting a blog to mindlessly shill for products in hopes of getting a commission, super low quality texts written/generated/spinned entirely for SEO reasons to place ads between the paragraphs etc doesn't come to mind when I ask myself "what could be better on the web?" If those things disappear tomorrow, I don't think a lot of us would miss them. We'd notice them being gone because it might feel like being able to breath freely after a strong cold, but I don't think many would miss them.
> But it will take a while until we start paying for news again, for example.
Plenty of people pay for news. They won't pay for Gawker or Buzzfeed though. I don't think that's a problem for anybody not invested in or working for those companies.