[vinbreau]

AT least many vloggers are moving to Patreon or similar services. I've funded vloggers whose content I've enjoyed and I've seen many make a living that way. I think that's the modal we should shoot for. You build an audience and then you monetize that audience in non-intrusive ways.

[TeMPOraL]

Indeed, even my favourite blogger whose articles I enjoy moved to Patreon and I'm planning to budget money for him from next paycheck :). I'm much happier to support people this way than through ads.

I'll be very happy to pay for content now that I am an adult and earn money (there's a problem though; I owe my career in part thanks to a lot of free content I could use as a kid). But I suspect that prices will have to drop - the typical use pattern of the Internet is that of breadth, not depth. Myself I visit many dozen different sites daily, often different the next day than the day before. I derive value from all of them, but not enough to pay each of them a few dollars of monthly subscription.

Or maybe this will finally incentivize people to build their websites to attract and keep customers instead of clickbaiting and carpet-bombing with unwanted ads.

[vinbreau]

"Or maybe this will finally incentivize people to build their websites to attract and keep customers instead of clickbaiting and carpet-bombing with unwanted ads."

This is it. We're suffering from the effects the "Content is king" mantra. Instead of sites having highly focused content, the drive is to constantly have fresh content. It's easy for a monthly magazine to have focused content due to the schedule. When a site has to have new content every single day, or worse, multiple pieces of content every day, of course that's going to lead to excessive fluff of all sorts. The sites with the best content I visit seem less concerned with frequency and more focused on quality. We're in a quantity > quality phase of the web.