[panic]

You could do indirect payments without ads. For example, say an organization gave grants to ad-free websites based on certain criteria. Some of these criteria could be how much people visit the site or how highly they rank it. Funding could come from people interested in keeping the web ad-free.

[manigandham]

This is still direct via donations. Just by a few doing it for the many.

So the question is, who are these special few?

NYT times costs hundreds of millions to run. That's just a single publisher. Most major sites require somewhere in the 8 figures. As theory and data have shown, human behavior is not conducive to paying if you can avoid it. Unless your plan is to turn content publishers into tax-funded state-run companies, I fail to see how this could possibly work.

* Before it's mentioned: Wikipedia is perhaps the only example of donations working at scale. However, it's not really working because Wikipedia doesn't produce any content. It's also not a business. Wikimedia which is an actual business runs the wikia.com network of sites and they're all monetized through ads.

[pdkl95]

> NYT times costs hundreds of millions to run.

Maybe their product isn't worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

As for willingness to pay, you seem to be projecting your own selfish behavior onto others. I know quite a few counter-examples that prove people are willing to pay for content they actually value. They have embraced technology to lower costs, and have cultivated very generous audiences using places like Patron.

> only example of donations working at scale

LOL. Only if you don't look. Also, why do you think everything has to work "at scale"? Small-but-loyal audiences are fine.

[manigandham]

> As for willingness to pay, you seem to be projecting your own selfish behavior onto others.

I believe this is what you're doing with your comments. A few counter examples are great but we already have billions of people online constantly generating data and plenty of experiments that have shown that donations do not work.

> Also, why do you think everything has to work "at scale"?

Because the internet is at scale. I'm not talking about a specific site but rather the donation model in general. Very few actually donate and thus it cannot sustain the quality and quantity of content that is available today. A few site/podcasts/shows/whatever might be able to work with this but it will not work for the internet as we know it today.

Value is subjective, just because it might not be worth direct payment doesn't mean it's worthless (ie: Facebook). As a common example take a look at adblocking: if you don't like the ads on a site, then you should stop visiting the site. By using adblocker and continuing to go to the site, your actions show that you find value in the content but do not care to let the publisher be compensated. This is just one of many manifestations of the human behavior I've described where donations by the few does not support content for the many.

[panic]

If enough people care about an ad-free web, it wouldn't have to be a special few: it could be a relatively large group of passionate people.

But that's just one idea. The point is that it's not a dichotomy of low-friction, indirect ads versus high-friction, direct payment. There may be other options.