[eva1984]

Or a third way, everybody hides content behind paywall, hail the new web 3.0. Maybe not a bad thing, subscription could bring the old qualified journalism back the in the print era.

If you don't think anti ad blocker is a problem, where is this article coming from? Hmmm, afraid that more websites would follow the trend so less content to read? The attitude that this is only websites and advertisers' problem is not as constructive as the author might presume.

[anexprogrammer]

Yet the news sites demonstrate how utterly clueless they are with the amount they set their online subscriptions to.

£1 a day for The Times - very nearly the cost of the actual paper. $1 daily to access Wired. Don't make me laugh. No one consumes all their news from a single source any more.

If my usage pattern is anything near representative, 2-5p a day for the Times and .5p a day for Wired, based on how often I visit equivalent sites and how many stories I read whilst there.

Seems like unless it's something very specialised (medical journal or similar), or the FT charging as though it was our sole news source just demonstrates how out of touch they are.

Sure, charge me £1-£2 a day for consumption, but that would have to be spread across 50-100 sites daily, some of which I've visited just once in the last year, for one article. AND, if I am going to be willing to be micro-charged I want a way to NOT pay a specific site (perhaps I visited and the content was poor). Make that happen I'll subscribe today.

Ask me for £1 for your shitty site daily and you'll wait forever, but good luck with your greed - that's what caused the adpocalypse in the first place.

[eva1984]

Hmmm, so you now understand advertising is not a evil business really, right?

It is effectively a way to price the information, how much should be paid for your view. Note in print days, you still pay your subscription, yet you get shit loads of ads. And you have a variety choices of publishers.

So why this is the worst model ever?

The article is laughable that it gives no solution, but asks publishers to evolve into oblivion, which I think they won't.

Some people are so pissed that publisher got anti ad blocker in place, yet claim they won't pay to their shitty articles whatsoever. But then again, if you don't read those shitty articles that much, why are you so pissed in the first place?

After all you need to pay what you consume, and ad is one way of it. It is not perfect, nor evil. Your call then.

[anexprogrammer]

> not a evil business really, right

Well I would agree, but ahem popups, popunders, sound, retargeting, tracking, simulated download buttons, simulated anti-virus messages, animations, sound, maximise on rollover, sound (sound there multiple times intentionally :p)

Now then, an industry that resorts to every underhand trick they can think of is not doing much to have my sympathy.

If I could visit a site with ADS, and just ads, without any tracking, retargeting or other trickery I'd gladly have the ads for that site on permanently. By the same token I wouldn't even mind seeing ads on the sites I actually paid for if they were locally hosted and tracking free.

> Note in print days, you still pay your subscription, yet you get shit loads of ads

How many print ads had sound, retargeting, tracking or dropped malware? Comparing apples and oranges here.

Oh no, just to make the internet usable I need to block >50% of the domains a page tries to load. So to turn on ads I need to figure out which of the 20 blocked domains and 10 blocked scripts will let ads through. But tracking and retargeting gets enabled when you do that. Fuck that.

Simple ads, no tracking. It's not hard.

[commentzorro]

> Some people are so pissed that publisher got anti ad blocker in place .... if you don't read those shitty articles that much, why are you so pissed in the first place?

I'm not pissed about the anti ad-block. I'm pissed because the sites show up when I'm searching in the first place. I'm pissed because I go to the site thinking I can get the information I was teased with in my search only to find out I've been tricked. I'm forced to do something (unblock the ads), accept some fake implicit agreement (you agree to look at our ads), and be spied on (all the trackers) before I can get to the content I was lead to believe was there.

The fix is to remove all blocked content from the search so we won't even know it exists in the first place. We won't get upset, we won't get blocked, the sites won't get content "stolen" by those who won't view or click the ads to being with. Everybody's happy. Win Win.

[eva1984]

Even paywall article get indexed and showed， I dont think anti ad block justify the cause.

[UweSchmidt]

I think anexprogrammer meant that literally: "Charge me 1-2£ per day and give me some choice where the money goes". I have paid for online content, and have considered it often for content creators that I like. You can get movies and music for a low monthly fee, why not articles? Hello business model!?

[anexprogrammer]

Pretty much :)

The way we consume media has changed. 20 years ago I'd have a daily newspaper to read on the commute and subscribe to a few magazines - say 5 a month.

In today's terms a spend of perhaps £1.50 a day for media.

Now I'll read 5 articles on the Guardian, 5 on Ars, 1 on Wired, 2 on the register, 1 on the Telegraph, 1 on NYT, another on The Atlantic etc, etc. Tomorrow will be a different selection. If I bought subscriptions as they are typically set online I'd be spending £30 or something a DAY on media. That's ridiculous.

So yes, there needs to be a better micro payments model for media consumption. I'd happily pay. The Google way of doing it is closest thus far, but doesn't give me any control of who gets paid. eg I'm not happy with a percentage of my micro spend going to the clickbaity upworthy article I clicked and bounced straight off.

[gglitch]

"Evil" is a ridiculous word to use in the first place; but for what it's worth, in my opinion, a platitude like "[ads are] not perfect, nor evil," glosses over the fact that ads often are vectors for attacks that rely on deception, ignorance, and unwitting surveillance, which definitely has an ugly moral flavor. The business model may not be inherently evil (what is?), but it sure seems to be a convenient technology for deliberate abuse via fraud and malware.

[CM30]

And then the sites not set up for business reasons end up getting the lion's share of the traffic? Because for however many sites might add a paywall for pay for 'journalism', there's an equal number of sites run by people for fun/a side hobby that are willing to give it out for free.

That's always going to significantly limit paywalls online. Too much competition from hobbyists and non profits that see their goal as helping people rather than selling their work.

[manigandham]

There really isnt any competition from "hobbyists/non-profits". The top publishers on the web all produce a ton of content, none of it can be run without a big business operation which has to earn something, either through advertising or paywalls.

[CM30]

Well, in the gaming scene, most of my news comes from social media sites, fan sites and fan run wikis, which don't tend to be run as businesses.

For example, if I want the latest information about Zelda U, I wouldn't go to IGN or Kotaku or Polygon, but instead to Zelda Informer, Dungeon or Wiki depending on what exactly I was looking for. If it was more general information, then that's what the likes of GoNintendo are for.

Of course, I could always just go to the company instead of a middleman; most of them are moving towards marketing straight to the consumer rather than the press. Given that most of say, IGN's information comes from summarising things like Nintendo Directs and E3 presentations, or from what's trending on Reddit or Twitter or Youtube, it seems more logical to go straight to the source than through the middleman.

Would this work in all fields? No, stuff that's dangerous or complex (like say, reporting on the war in Syria or what not) tends to need more professional organisations. But if you're after information on games, TV shows, movies, music, celebrity gossip or sports, then to some degree you can pretty much entirely replace the professional media with fan sites and blogs.

It's also why paywalls are going to be a problem even in the short term; anything factual you put behind one is going to end up on the fan run sites and aggregators anyway. If a big site puts something interesting up behind their paywall, then it'll be maybe about ten minutes before someone's ripped the whole thing, stuck it on sites like Youtube and its then been posted across the entire blogosphere.

[manigandham]

Sure, but that's not really professionally produced content then. Wiki's and social sites are just users creating content for themselves, which is a fine system, although most wikis (especially the wikia network) is all financed through advertising anyway so it's the same thing.

Paywalled content is going to need to be more than facts, in fact if it's just facts then most news sources are overkill. Rather its the voice and other in-depth journalism that would demand a premium. In this case though there are pretty powerful copyright protection systems in place that it's not really a worry. The same reason why little youtube players complain about stolen videos but not the big studios.