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I'm in favor of a move from ad-based to paywalled content. It just feels more honest to sell your content than your readers (or viewers, visitors, etc). There's also a mental hygeine aspect: I've noticed a pretty distinct correlation between my total exposure to online advertising and my ability to reach states of deep focus. For example, I've been finding it extremely difficult to finish books for the past few years. But since February or so, as my exposure to online ads has dropped to nearly zero, I've knocked half a dozen challenging non-fiction works off my hit list, and a few novels to boot. And it's not just mental stamina -- my moment to moment engagement and comprehension is also much higher. This observation is anecdotal, and furthermore, poorly controlled, so establishing causality is pretty difficult. But I have noticed that when I DO browse facebook or other ad-heavy sites, I experience a significant drop in my level of mental energy, often for hours after I'm off the internet. It's as if viewing ads, which are designed to grab one's attention, forks a process in my brain whose task is to react to the ad content, thus depleting my brain-hardware resources. The social hooks make facebook a particularly bad culprit. BUT, there's a big caveat. I don't want subscriptions -- at least, not on every site that sometimes puts out content that I like. That would cost me hundreds of buxx a month that I simply can't afford. There needs to be a decent micropayment solution so that people can buy the content that they actually want without the overhead of paying for a bunch of stuff they don't care about. I speculate that this would be a pure win for content companies. Right now, paywalls are more like "go-away-walls." If there were buttons on paywalls that said "Read this article for 50 cents," I would personally be paying for a lot more articles. There's probably even a good business opportunity in mediating these transactions to centralize signups and aggregate purchased content. |