The answer I keep returning to: if shady ads is what keeps your business running, stop running your business. Switch off the lights and the servers and go home.
That’s too simplistic a take: they aren’t running shady ads and unlike many sites they allow you to you subscribe and not see ads at all. Unfortunately, large chunks of the public — especially tech site visitors — have been conditioned to think of content as free, and the adtech bubble hasn’t pooped yet so we can’t reverse that trend.
What people are willing to pay for content is I think almost zero.
If we get rid of these privacy invading ads and micropayments/subscriptions don’t take off in a big way (I don’t think they will) then one or two things must happen
1) advertising money remains even though ads are dumber (less narrowly targeted, more fraud etc)
2) there is a lot less money to go around so there must simply be less content.
I think the answer is somewhere in between. I don’t think it’s a pessimistic view that maybe 75% of sites not only risks disappearing but perhaps should. The abundance of “free” content is what makes people unwilling to pay for quality.
I definitely think you’re right on the conclusion: a lot of content sites are going to need to dramatically scale back their size or simply fold. It feels a lot like when VCs pile money into an area and it takes longer for viable business models to win out, only with a much longer run time since the advertising market is so much larger.
Exactly yes. I don’t care if 80% of content online would disappear, or the thousands of jobs making that content, or the billions invested in it. It seems irrelevant in comparison.