[pdkl95]

Paying directly changes the relationship significantly - a business is generally going to pay attention to their customers that produce their revenue than the "free" accounts that are the merely the product being sold to advertisers.

The Onion was right[1]. In the rush to sell out their "users" to to whomever is willing to pay, a lot of people seem to have come to believe that advertising is the only way to the internet can work.

The internet enabled many new ways of publishing due it removing most of the per-transaction costs. I suspect we haven't even seen most of these methods. While "Kickstarter" style funding and Wikipedia's "public television style" requests for donations, while interesting experiments, are only the first generation of what is enabled by the internet.

Unfortunately, untested and unproven (by somebody else) ideas do imply some amount of risk, which scares a lot of people back into the traditional method where the advertisers get to paint over everything.

edit: forgot URL

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o