[mindslight]

Advertising wasn't always the norm, and I would personally love to return to the days where people published because they actually had something to say. How many search results these days are from those extremely valuable sites with one person geeking out on everything they know about a topic, versus the sheer number of content farms regurgitating the same simplistic crap just to get page views and ultimately waste your time?

In fact, I'd been waiting until the next DuckDuckGo thread came up to throw out the idea that DDG could further differentiate itself by having an option to only return results from sites without advertisements. I would love such a feature, even using Adblock, because I think the quality of the results would go up immensely.

[caryhartline]

Advertising pays for a lot of very legitimate content-focused blogs/news organizations as well.

People can't afford to pay for every single blog or bit of news they read and authors can't do anything substantial or meaningful without making it a job(and needing money to do it).

[fishpi]

I'm not sure that "can't afford" is the right conclusion. The amount of money a site makes off each person by showing ads is miniscule, so almost anyone could afford to pay at least as much for the content as the adverts make.

I think it's more likely that the mental overhead of choosing whether to pay for something (which is roughly constant, even for small amounts of money) adds enough friction to the process that charging small amounts never works.

[teddyh]

> authors can't do anything substantial or meaningful without making it a job(and needing money to do it).

Citation needed, please.

[superuser2]

>people published because they actually had something to say

I'd much rather see news alongside ads or behind a paywall than news which was paid for by a group with "something to say."