Seems that monetizing content on the Internet is going to be an ongoing problem that doesn't have a really good solution.
I did click on the link, and whatever ads were on it were blocked by my adblocker. I think the writer may not understand that neither I nor anybody else specifically decided to block ads on Destructoid, a site that I had never heard of before today. We block all ads everywhere by default.
Most websurfers will regularly click to articles on sites they've never been to before, many of which are loaded with huge, bandwidth-sucking ads, often with loads of flash, javascript, pop-ups, pop-overs, etc, and sometimes even auto-downloading malware. I want to block all ads everywhere by default because I don't have the time to pay attention to the ad type and policy of every site that I'm only going to visit once, and I'd rather have the problem solved once and for all.
Paid subscriptions may be nice in a way, but they also seem to tear at the fabric of the internet. If all sites used them for most of their content, then most people would only read stuff posted at the 3-4 sites that they visited regularly and actually paid for, instead of surfing all over the place. How do you get new readers in that model?
It might help if there was some way to do micropayments per read - possibly with Bitcoin or something like that. Maybe some sort of big subscription network - like readers pay a subscription fee, and writers in the network get paid a small amount when a subscriber reads their article. I'm not sure what the long-term solution is, but I hope that it's one without ads.
I did click on the link, and whatever ads were on it were blocked by my adblocker. I think the writer may not understand that neither I nor anybody else specifically decided to block ads on Destructoid, a site that I had never heard of before today. We block all ads everywhere by default.
Most websurfers will regularly click to articles on sites they've never been to before, many of which are loaded with huge, bandwidth-sucking ads, often with loads of flash, javascript, pop-ups, pop-overs, etc, and sometimes even auto-downloading malware. I want to block all ads everywhere by default because I don't have the time to pay attention to the ad type and policy of every site that I'm only going to visit once, and I'd rather have the problem solved once and for all.
Paid subscriptions may be nice in a way, but they also seem to tear at the fabric of the internet. If all sites used them for most of their content, then most people would only read stuff posted at the 3-4 sites that they visited regularly and actually paid for, instead of surfing all over the place. How do you get new readers in that model?
It might help if there was some way to do micropayments per read - possibly with Bitcoin or something like that. Maybe some sort of big subscription network - like readers pay a subscription fee, and writers in the network get paid a small amount when a subscriber reads their article. I'm not sure what the long-term solution is, but I hope that it's one without ads.