[somenameforme]

Sites are using ads to be anti-competitive, such that you literally cannot compete with them on price because their price is $0. I'm rather surprised that we haven't seen the emergence of a site where you are literally paid to use it, because that business model is 100% viable.

And the reason that business model is viable is because people don't realize how literally valuable their attention is. And most people also think they're not heavily affected by advertising. Sites are actively exploiting this to deter competition. I would not be, in the least bit, sad to see this state of affairs end.

[Fnoord]

SomethingAwful forums have this for ages but also newspapers do, too. As do streaming services. Turns out youth don't have much to spend (nor to people generally outside of West), and it stops sockpuppets somewhat.

[dns_snek]

Generally speaking youth have more than enough money to pay the same rates advertisers pay. But publishers want to take users who earn them $0.10 per month through ads and charge them $10 per month as a subscription, that's where the business model obviously breaks down and they claim that ads are the only thing that works.

[account42]

Those are websites you have to pay, not websites that pay you to use them.

[Fnoord]

Yep, my bad I misread.

That existed in past. It was a program you had to run, and it would force you to watch ads (while browsing?). IIRC it embedded MSIE. I was still in high school, and my classmate who had cable internet would run this almost 24/7. It made him earn a couple of hundreds of dollars (end of 90s). There were also all kind of hacks to make it not so annoying (because you had to watch it all the time). Eventually, they quit paying.

There's also a TV you can get for free (it being worth 600 EUR?), but it has a camera and watches your living room 24/7 (if the TV is in your living room?). It also has very strict ToS.