[bill_rr]

That first sentence took me a little while to wrap my head around and I don't think it's true or logical. In other words, even if it was true, I don't see why it matters.

I'm building a company that plans to charge people to read things. The reading experience, without ads, is superior. It's worth paying for. That means that an ad free future is possible.

[SQueeeeeL]

You may think it's worth paying for, but your average consume will not. It makes sense from a consumer point of view, how am I to know if this "superior" experience is worth my money if I haven't tried it. How do I know it will stay that way, lots of magazines and newspapers quality tanked after they got high subscription numbers.

[sebastos]

"Did you see that new Thai joint opened up down the street? I heard it was pretty good. Want to try it out?"

"And just how are we to know for _sure_ that this trumped up restaurant is truly superior?"

In other words, this is how capitalism works. Businesses and vendors make value propositions, then people take chances on them. It works for every single other class of good, but for some reason the big brains that run the internet can't wrap their head around how it would work for them.

Some people have understood this, and they're making a killing from it. For instance, which do you watch more of, HBO, Hulu, Prime and Netflix or broadcast TV? Tons and tons of people are happy to shell out cash for products they consider worth it.

Newspapers and magazines have tried to convince us that these asshole millenials refuse to pay for things anymore, but what they mean is they refuse to pay for shitty things. They're actually perfectly happy to OVERpay for things they like. It just turns out newspapers and magazines aren't, you know, worth that much.

[awad]

Forget the average consumer...it's pretty much guaranteed there will be an outline.com link posted on any paywalled article on HN (along with the usual paywall complaint) and this crowd seems to fancy itself above the average consumer.

[ribosometronome]

>It's worth paying for.

Given the current state of the web and the struggle that many media companies are having, I don't think we can take this for granted today.

Fingers crossed that you and experiences like Mozilla's proposed can change this.

[weberc2]

Maybe your business attracts customers now because they have a lot of discretionary income to spend on it, but if other services that are a higher priority to your users start to find a subscription model to be more valuable than an ad model (because ad blocking is too effective, for example), your customers will have less discretionary income to put to ad-free reading. Further, all of those ad-subsidized reading sites now become your competition.

This isn’t a pro-ads argument, but an appeal to sober, informed debate.

[jameshart]

I think you’re right, there is definitely room for consumer-funded content in the market - and I wish you the best in your endeavors.

But I think suggesting an ad-free future is a leap, not least because paid content platforms need to do marketing. Why do you have a Netflix subscription? Because you heard they had some good shows? how do you know what shows they have before you subscribe?