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by xoa
3035 days ago
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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. |
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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.