[arbitrage]

The whole point of a business is to come up with a plan to get people to give it money for a service. If your entire business plan is to get someone else to give you money because people completely unrelated to and uninterested in it happen to be using your service, it's not really a good plan.

I'm ecstatic about the seemingly new increase in paid-for content. If it means the long dark era of scatter-shot shotgun creation of incredibly lousy and shallow information in mass quantities only to garner advertising payments comes to an end (or even decreases slightly), I think the web and software in general will be a better place.

[frik]

Would you like to go back to Internet stoneage where you had to pay per page view in Microsoft Network '95 (MSN v1) or Germany's BTX from 1980s.

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall?

The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money. At the moment many ad networks are just stubborn (bad ads) and greedy taking big chunk of the ads money away, instead of sending it to the website owner who is doing the majority of work. So there is definitely a place for a new ad network that disrupt the Web ads that don't suck and with a smaller cut so that the website owner get again a bit more money.

[forgottenpass]

Would you like to subscribe on hundreds of websites to access their paywall?

I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now. If all the ad-supported websites I use went behind paywalls, I'd be fine with that.

I'd pay for google and one or two more news orgs in addition to the ones I'm subscribed to. The rest of the websites I depend on and don't pay for are non-profits and/or don't run ads in the first place.

The WWW got popular because it's friction-free and many sites are paid by advertisement money.

Yes, and I guess I don't care. I was online before then, we can go back to that small world again. The web's popularity is largely an explosion in the equivalent of cable TV networks. If adblockers push them out, oh well.

[pmontra]

> I don't rely on hundreds of ad-supported websites now.

I don't know if I do but I might do. The reason I don't know it is that I use AdBlock but whenever I google something I go to a few well known sites and to hundreds of random blogs. If I had to pay for each of them I'll probably use the Internet very differently.

[andybak]

I think the fairest thing is for both users to decide if they want to block ads and for site owners to decide if they want to block users who block ads.

Let's see how that pans out. I predict we'd end up mostly back where we are.

My ideal scenario would be 'informed curated blocking' where the worst offenders (ad networks that don't have sufficient safeguards against malware, genuinely abuse privacy controls or push the envelope for instrusive ads) are forced out of the market.

[Nadya]

Go ahead and try to block users who block ads. People and companies have already tried that.

In the end it's a game of cat and mouse with the AdBlockers finding a way to circumvent whatever detection the adblock-blockers are using.

[manigandham]

It's called paywalls. Adblock will not get you around that.

[chc]

Paywalls don't specifically block people who block ads. They're a completely different revenue strategy.

[manigandham]

That was my point, there's no way to perfectly stop adblockers since they are part of the client. The only way to stop them is to paywall, which will start to become more common.

[mavhc]

Would you like to go back to the AOL model, where sites got a proportion of the user's AOL subscription?

[Aissen]

In fact, this exists. It's called Flattr.

[chc]

Flattr is a donation model, not a subscription model. Donation models are much less lucrative in general than nearly anything else because you can just forget to donate after reading. This is why Exhibit A for the donation revenue model is non-profits.

[frik]

I would like that the Web stays at it is.

[JadeNB]

But you seem to argue against the culture of the web the way it currently is, which, whatever the morality of it (I use blockers with abandon!), includes both pushy, aggressive ads and ad blockers.

[dhimes]

Speaking for myself, ads don't bother me so much. Tracking does. And serving me ads on content I have already paid for really fucking does.

Like purchasing a movie dvd and being coerced to watch previews for other movies before getting to the one I want. grrrrr.

[notNow]

Actually, if you paid for content or made a purchase driven by an ad, this makes you a "high value" lead for advertisers based on their estimation of your disposable income and therefore you are more likely to be targeted with more ads from them to make even more big-ticket purchases.

You can't really escape those pesky advertisers.

[Zarel]

An internet full of paid content is an internet that excludes many children and people in third-world countries, and in general more hostile to the poor than the wealthy. It's also an Internet that incentivizes sticking to a few sites you're used to rather than exploration of new things.

Is that really the internet you want?

[manigandham]

That seems incredibly dismissive of all the content out there. Just because something is "shallow" to you does not mean others don't enjoy it.

There is no such thing as "quality", its all subjective and the reason why there's so much gossip news and stuff is because so many people like to read it. BuzzFeed didnt get this big because nobody comes back to read their articles. That's the simple truth.

And nobody wants to pay for content when it's so easy to get things for free. Micropayments are not some easy answer (very hard to pull off) and they are no less private, in fact they will require even more tracking and even more data, down to your real identity and billing details.