It's a perfectly valid position to take that we'd all be better off if people weren't allowed to effectively pay for things with their attention. You just need to be OK with the corollary that if you can't/won't pay money for a lot of content/services/etc. you'll just have to do without. I suspect we'd see more innovative payment services but I also suspect that a lot of things would just go away and the Internet would be much more the domain of people who could afford to pay lots of money.
> "we'd all be better off if people weren't allowed to effectively pay for things with their attention."
Recently I got an advert like "unsold camper vans being sold off cheap in UK". It's the kind of Taboola/Outbrain title that I didn't believe was true but I was watching some camping content[1] and I clicked the ad. Who knows, maybe it would be interesting to see how much they were discounted and maybe it would support the site I was on. It took me to a page of 'best searches' which had nothing to do with camper vans or any specific sale. The searches were things like 'biggest car dealership uk'. I clicked one, it took me to a Yahoo! search for that generic and unrelated search term.
I have no idea what created any 'value' anywhere in that. Who paid someone to make a website with generic searches to Yahoo!? Who paid someone to run a lying advert pointing to an unrelated link to a Yahoo! search?
Who thinks that "my attention effectively paid for something" in that couple of minutes is real and not laughable delusion?
[1] I have no intention of buying a camper van, so even if the ad was honest and accurate it wouldn't have added any value to anything. Point is, it wasn't, and most ads like that aren't.
The interesting thing is that I pay for some services directly in order to avoid advertisements, the big one being email. Did zippyshare even offer a paid tier? I could see myself paying for a file hosting site that did not feed ads to me or the people downloading the files.
I'm glad to see more push back against ads and the toxic ecosystem that it brings with it.
Oh, I'm not against advertising, and never claimed to be.
Nothing wrong with people or companies letting me know about things they are selling that I might even like.
But a) the majority of advertising we see for big companies is not needed and b) my point still stands that if you can't make money except through web ads, you don't have a solid business model.
>if you can't make money except through web ads, you don't have a solid business model
It's probably true that a huge number of sites providing online content without a paywall don't have a solid business model. They'd probably mostly go away absent ads though and subscriptions for those with a paywall would increase.
> It's probably true that a huge number of sites providing online content without a paywall don't have a solid business model. They'd probably mostly go away absent ads though and subscriptions for those with a paywall would increase.
IMO that would make the Internet a much better place.
How many sites do you regularly read that you wouldn't mind paying $1 or 2 for?
I don't mean big sites like HN or Reddit or whatever, they are not going anywhere, but a ton of small kind of specific sites, they are going to have to turn to that model.
Look at the amount of sites that cover say MCU movies, most of them only exist because of ad money, not because people really enjoy their writing and insights.
