[solardev]

One take: Maybe some websites don't need to exist?

If nobody wants to pay for it, and you don't want to make it for free, maybe there's a case to be made that it just doesn't have to be made at all?

Ads just force a market to optimize for clickbait and readership, not quality. Having fewer websites, each more expensive and intentional, would probably drastically increase the signal to noise ratio of the web.

We could probably lose 80 to 90 percent of the current content on the web and not miss most of it...

[Yawrehto]

Except...what if the website is primarily targeted at people in a developing country who might not be able to pay, even if they wanted to? Then useful websites, providing useful information, would vanish. Your idea is good if the people are rich and willing to donate to good websites, but it completely breaks down once you consider websites where people may adore it and desperately want to donate, but be unable to.[1] It's fair that AI-BS websites probably shouldn't survive, but using money as a proxy for how much people like it unfairly catches websites in developing countries, where people might need that information the most. [1] Some quick googling turns up - and I have no idea about the reliability of these websites, but they do seem like good candidates for 'might provide valuable information but the community might not have the means', nyasatimes.com and horseedmedia.net, from Malawi and Somalia respectively. Also, looking at w3newspapers.com, there are a lot of online newspapers in very poor countries.

[solardev]

Are the costs of hosting (aside from domain registrations) usually borne by richer countries on behalf of poorer ones?

If not, if they're staffed and hosted in-country, I'd have thought their costs and profits would scale to regional costs of living. Like it takes less money to run a paper in Somalia than in New York. Is that a wrong assumption?

[Yawrehto]

Probably it does cost less - one imagines rent in Mogadishu is cheaper than in NYC - unless you're somewhere very unstable. But, I think it doesn't cost nearly as much less as it would in other industries, e.g., manufacturing. The cost of producing a story probably stays fairly similar across countries. And people have much less money to donate or click on the products the ads are hawking, so you're still not getting enough money.

[shanecleveland]

Better yet, if you don't agree with the method of monetization of a website, don't visit it. Don't whine about it. Don't use an ad blocker. I routinely back out of websites with obtrusive advertising. I find an alternate source, and reward them with my visit.

[skydhash]

The content is for free. I just strip out what I don't like. Very much like when I was young and cutting out car pictures out of magazines. Except that the magazines did the smart thing and asked for payment first.

[shanecleveland]

So the car pictures you cut out were not free. Not a good comparison.

Unless you are saying you would be willing to pay up front for every website you want to visit. Is that right?

[skydhash]

Very much. I already pay for my self hosted software, I pay for cloud storage, I also pay for various services around the web. I used to pay for medium (when it was good), if my workflow was dependent on a piece of software and I needed to pay to have access to a good support forum, I'd do that too.

I'm grateful for the fact that so many people are open to share their knowledge for free. But even in this case, I'm paying for the internet to visit their websites. And for the amount of information I get from HN, I'd pay for a membership subscription.

One is entitled to add ads to one's webpages. But the computer is mine and I'm totally free to not display them. The same way I'm free to mute my TV and switch channels when the ads start. Or skip forward on the podcast. It's my personal computing/entertainment space, I decide what I'm exposed to.

[shanecleveland]

I agree. As I said in another comment, you have the right to not visit sites in the same way you have the right to change your TV channel. But what you cannot do on your TV is strip away ads and force a channel to only show programming.

My pie-in-the-sky theory is that if enough people avoided "abusive" ad sites, they would change their behavior. But if ad blockers are used instead, the bad sites get more abusive to circumvent them, and the responsible sites become unsustainable.

[solardev]

I'd rather just be able to pay them, like EU Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, etc.