What would you consider as the alternative?
People are so used to getting news and various services "for free", it's very difficult to get them to pay for it.
Advertising _without tracking_. Advertising was done that way for all of human history until recently. Take away their ability to run arbitrary code on users machines and the problem is completely solved. There just needs to be an advertising company that steps up to the plate and says: We will get your ads to eyeballs and _we_ will ensure sites are holding up their end of the deal instead of deferring that role to user machines. You won't be able to track users, but you never should have been allowed to do that anyway.
Quite a lot of material on the web is only there because of advertising, not because it's any good. Unsurprisingly the "free market" doesn't work very well when everything has a zero cost associated with it.
The downside of losing ad-supported media will be ad-sponsored media paying to write the content itself.
This has certainly been the "common wisdom" trotted out for a long time now, but it's also always struck me as post-hoc reasoning. There simply has never been a modern industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system, despite advances in technology and user sophistication over the last 20 years. If ads simply were no longer economically viable, would users really simply give up on all news and such? Everyone would simply throw in the towel?
I'm extremely skeptical. It's not at all hard to think of a lot of different ways that would be enormously convenient and highly transparent to users to have direct pay options. I think they haven't been tried because of the standard technology issues: we're in a local minima and there is enormous inertia with what "everyone uses" already. But that's not at all the same thing as being in an absolute minima, where any change would necessarily be less efficient. Quite the contrary, in tracking flow of money and resources advertising looks to have quite a few unnecessary inefficiencies between user goals and publisher goals. That being the case I see no reason to believe inherently that something better could not be developed if there was sufficient motivation, and an existential threat would certainly be that.
> industry-wide, concerted effort towards creating and requiring use of an extremely convenient web pay system
Without government backing, the system you envisage would ironically be prohibited by antitrust laws. It would be a rather clear example of price-fixing and collusion by competitors. Maybe there's some way to do this through peer pressure or incentives, but I think we've seen that approach fail so often that it's hard to see what could be done differently short of a hardline approach that would trigger regulatory scrutiny.
> People are so used to getting news and various services "for free"
Many people I know (myself included) pay for articles they read on the sources they choose.
It's the websites that copy the articles, mix the words a bit and republish that get into trouble and in my experience have the most problems with ad blockers. I don't think that's a bad thing.
Like others said here, if nobody wants to pay for your articles you either publish them for free or do something else with your life.
I think you should also use quotation marks around the word news.
Maybe the alternative is: if you don't want to charge for the content you produce or give it for free don't bother producing it. There are huge chances your content is just shit anyway.
I've been idly wondering if it would be so bad if advertising on the web simply wasn't profitable. Losing search engines seems like the biggest loss to me, and admittedly it's a doozy. But otherwise, it's not immediately obvious to me that the web is better for all the ad-funded content on it in the first place.
This situation is similar to dumping[1]. The only reason people aren't willing to pay for content is that there's always another company willing to give it away for "free" by leveraging ads. The reason that's economical is that all-pervasive tracking inflates the value of ad inventory and allows for a lot of additional "value" to be created even if the visitor doesn't click on an ad. If some of the most abusive adtech practices were flat out illegal paid services could compete again because a profitable, "free" alternative would not be possible.
The other form of dumping comes from tech companies operating in the red but surviving on investment dollars. Frankly, this is a result of growing wealth and income inequality that leaves investors with few avenues for growth outside of ad-funded moonshots as consumers aren't able to drive growth like they used to due to flat income.
Edit: Imagine a world where the average consumer makes $10k more per year, then turns around and spends some of that on online services. You now have a situation where the interests of the user and web service provider are aligned. The user is now the customer, not the product.
People created content on the internet before there was advertising. So to reiterate the GP's point, fuck ads and fuck ad companies, even the "legitimate" ones are a blight on the landscape and quite frankly scum.
For text, computing resources are cheap enough that it can be entirely non-profit or run by independent bloggers, etc. Wikipedia, blogs, IRC, and sites like HN don't require all that much and could be financed without ads if they chose to be.
Video, particularly HD video, absolutely requires ads or subscriptions. Social networks could probably be built atop WebRTC and run in a federated way, more like IRC... but image or video sharing would start to demand significant resources.
A vast majority of that content is dog shit. Losing it would mean a net loss of precisely nothing. My favorite sites don’t run ads, and either pay for access (NYT), accept donations, or do it for the love of doing it. I’m happy to lose the endlessly nested clickbait in favor of quality that doesn’t update every 5 seconds.