[gtirloni]

Yes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get paid.

I'd rather have paywalls than widespread ads. At least it's the normal arrangement that way: you create something valuable, I pay for it. Very clear cut. With ads that relationship is blurry.

[simion314]

>Yes but the romantic era of blogging is over. Content creators have to get paid.

IMO most bloggers are not living by writing blogs, the blogs post are used usually for promotion or other reasons and not to make a few cents.

Newspapers are a different thing.

[gtirloni]

Sure, but we're talking about bloggers than want to profit. Otherwise, they wouldn't have paywalls, right?

In that case, if their content is just self-promotion and doesn't have a lot of value, fewer people will pay.

EDIT: Really puzzled by the downvotes, care to elaborate?

[simion314]

I did not downvote, I was under the wrong impression that all medium posts are under paywall but I checked now ( https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018834314-Stori... ) and it seems the blogger must opt-in into it, so maybe the downvoters also had same impression as me.

Still weird that some person wants to promote some conference and fine volunteers and puts it under a paywall.

[verdverm]

Medium still requires login after so many visits to the site, regardless if the content is behind the paywall

[verdverm]

Run your own blog, no need to embed ads. Create content for others rather than to get paid.

[_lqaf]

1) I'm going to guess that the count of independent bloggers whose primary income derives from their blog is, at best, in the three digit range.

2) I can't speak for others, but paywalls have convinced me to give money to zero entities. I do subscribe to a couple, but making me delete my cookies was not their sales tactic.

3) Completely aside from all that, none of this says anything about HN, and is worth discussion. If I post a link to one of the sites I subscribe to with a larger price tag, where's the line? At what point does it damage conversation? I wonder if, on average, there's less discussion of paywalled links, or if the participant pool is different.

Just as one datapoint, I think Google News should not include WSJ links in the default feed. It is nothing but an ad, which is ironic considering the rest of news.google.com is ad-free.