If you produce content, no one is willing to pay for it and your only source of income for it is adverts then I say your business model is flawed and good riddance to you.
I don't disagree with you, but just from a devil's advocate point of view, some would argue that by using ads to pay for the content, it allows the content to get to those people who couldn't have afforded to pay for it themselves.
> Or, niche topics that can't draw enough support to stay afloat
This isn't specific to adverts and applies to every industry/endeavour that depends on voluntary engagement for funding. Name one thing that does not require a minimum level of popularity to be self-sustaining
It's not flawed, it's just not simple. Or, it's a happy accident that people figured out how to be middlemen between advertisers and news consumers (the classic example).
In the paper newspaper days I didn't mind ads at all. And I probably wouldn't have paid the full cost of subscription if the advertisers weren't the real source of income.
Now, as someone in another said, advertisers are stalkers. I mind that.
In the newspaper, the ads stayed in their boxes, and you could easily ignore them - honestly, I don't ever actually seeing newspaper ads, they faded into the background so much. They weren't playing music, flashing gifs, launching fullscreen popup windows and click-through modals.
Have you seen a weekend local paper in the U.S. recently? There are whole ad sections that I drop straight in the trash. It's often at least 50% of the paper by weight.
There may be deals for supermarket meat etc. but in general it seems like a total waste.
Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realistic to say to a smaller niche blog to produce "better" and more frequent content that appeals to everyone. That's part of the beauty of thousands of niche web sites over, for example, dozens of niche magazines of the past.
So, there is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. There needs to be a way to aggregate all these sites into a single payment system. You pay for a year and get access to the sites you like. Then this payment processing company takes care of allocating the money based on various factors like how many people access each article.
Finally, in order to maximize revenue to content providers, this company should be setup not to take a fixed percent of each transaction but only take what it needs to sustain itself. In other words, at the end of each week/month/whatever the company totals up it's expenses and take their percentage only up sustainability (which includes growth factors). No more middle man leaches!
Such a “well rounded web” has no inherent right to exist. If it is at the cost of having ads, and that cost is too high, then we won’t get it. And that would be fine with me. I remember the Internet before the web. I can easily imagine an Internet without it.
The part I disagree with is the "no one is willing to pay for" part. Should have made that clearer.
I contend that lots of people are willing to pay, just not by the current means. (And proposed a possible solution that would suit me, and what I naively believe to be others too.)