I know that I'm not interested in "compromising" with the ad-tech industry. They've been spending too much time and money attacking my defenses against their terrible practices for me to treat them as anything but an attacker.
Not that I support the ad-tech industry, but those consumers probably are interested in having their favorite websites being kept alive. Which implies that they might indeed be interested in "compromising" with ad-tech industry.
it isn't about giving ad-tech any chance of anything, it is about websites that are liked and used by people (most of whom have either no means or no desire to support those websites with money directly) being able to sustain themselves in order to exist.
If only there were other models for ad sales, say ones that were successfully used for decades prior to the advent of the internet and ubiquitous surveillance, that could be used instead of said ubiquitous surveillance...
But no. The internet enabled vast, invasive user tracking, therefore vast, invasive user tracking is the only conceivable way to sell advertising.
That's pretty much a false dichotomy: a site must either support itself via ads, or cease to exist.
There are other ways to get money to support your work, and if those ways are too painful right now, that's just an opportunity for disruption. Even better, it's an opportunity to prove that disruption doesn't have to be exploitative.
There are entire markets that cannot be accessed by publishers unless they subsidize content with ads. That is not a false dichotomy, that is a market requirement.
Not every website is the WSJ or Bloomberg, which cater to markets that are willing to pay for content.
Not saying that it has to be ads only. If there comes a disruptive alternative revenue model that allows all those websites to self-support themselves, I will be one of the first people to jump the ship and advocate for the ban of ads in favor of that new model.
To be honest, that doesn't matter to me. I think that websites who inflict the ad-slingers on their readers are showing great disrespect to and disregard for their readers.
> but those consumers probably are interested in having their favorite websites being kept alive.
I'm one of "those consumers" and I'm actively looking for sustainable ways to pay content producers.
Here's what I do currently:
- subscribe to two newspapers in addition to the mandatory payments to the national news broadcaster.
- donate to the Guardian
- buy on Blendle
If there was a way to pay for single pay-walled stories I would probably use it a few times a week in addition to my current subscriptions.
I'm not interested in any more subscriptions (unless they are all inclusive like Spotify so I can cancel my current subscriptions, and even then I'm not sure since I actually want to support those two papers and think I do so better through direct payments than through revenue sharing through a huge international tech company. )
More generally, if enough people (including the author) think the content has merit, they will choose to support it (by which I mean “collectively supply all the resources it needs to continue”).
The cost of running a basic website to publish text is modest. Tools like [dat][] and [scuttlebutt][] make it completely free (once you have a computer and any internet connection) to distribute content to people who actually want it.
On the other hand, if you want to make a living out of producing content (rather than wanting to publish the content purely for its merit), that is harder — the content has to be that much more valuable to enough people.
As long as individuals can publish stuff, and others can see it and choose whether to support it financially (all without 3rd parties mediating/filtering), then I'm content. Our distributed tools make that possible; we just need to make them easier and more ubiquitous.
