[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.