[stuffbyspencer]

I hate that we still are talking about this. Ads suck, and there's already a better way to do things.

Micropayments are the answer. Everyone on the internet pays a small monthly fee, say $5/month (ideally this would just be integrated into your internet bill), and every piece of content you view streams tiny amounts of that fee to whatever content you are viewing. The actual amount sent is based on your monthly usage, and never goes over that $5/month cap. People who browse less send more.

A webextension tested this years ago & it was sweet. Businesses could be sustainable on there own, no ads, no data selling. If you have viewers, you have currency. But, it wasn't a seamless experience so it didn't take off.

Make no mistake: This is the best possible way to fund the open web, which is exactly why Google pretends it doesn't exist. If chrome had this feature built in & people never had to think about it, ads would drop to near 0 incredibly fast. Google says no.

We are doomed to have an enshittified web because the powers that be won't integrate sustainable funding mechanisms.

[homebrewer]

It's a very "first world" problem. Maybe it would work in the few rich countries the world has, but as someone who lives in a region with the median monthly income of under $300, I can assure you it would be difficult to extract anything over $0 from most of our population because people don't have money to spend on things that can be obtained for free. Many people I know have literally zero cash by the end of the month after all necessities are taken care of. AFAIU, most of the world's population lives something like that, a bit better here, a bit worse there, but still.

[stuffbyspencer]

This isn't an issue. You either have the ability to pay the monthly fee (which would probably enable cheaper subscriptions, saving people money), or you can't afford it & you'll experience the same web experience you have now.

For people in lower economic areas, their monthly fee would be relative to the median income (hence the "integrated into your internet bill").

What I'm saying is we have a solution that is being suppressed. It would fix the internet for 80% of people, and the other 20% would experience no downside.