I see your view, but my problem is, I really like free content.
I can accept that to produce and distribute that content costs someone money. The ad based revenue model aligns very nicely with the quality of the content produced (assuming greater quality == more readers).
The problem with the pay per read model is that you don't know if you want to pay before your read. Now that probably works for larger publishers of quality work (e.g. IEEE), but for those random one-hit-wonder bloggers (and there are many of them), how would you know if yesterday's highly linked post was worth the 50 cents?
Some times a three paragraph blog post is insightful enough to be worth the nickel, sometimes I wish they paid me for the 2 minutes it took to read.
With a book or a larger volume of work, it's easier to briefly browse and make a purchase decision.
For the informal survey, I don't use ad blockers, but I just don't get bothered by the ads (with the random access afforded by a visual page they are rather simple to avoid). The onerous ones click-throughs and pop-ups), yeah, those are annoying.
I can accept that to produce and distribute that content costs someone money. The ad based revenue model aligns very nicely with the quality of the content produced (assuming greater quality == more readers).
The problem with the pay per read model is that you don't know if you want to pay before your read. Now that probably works for larger publishers of quality work (e.g. IEEE), but for those random one-hit-wonder bloggers (and there are many of them), how would you know if yesterday's highly linked post was worth the 50 cents?
Some times a three paragraph blog post is insightful enough to be worth the nickel, sometimes I wish they paid me for the 2 minutes it took to read.
With a book or a larger volume of work, it's easier to briefly browse and make a purchase decision.
For the informal survey, I don't use ad blockers, but I just don't get bothered by the ads (with the random access afforded by a visual page they are rather simple to avoid). The onerous ones click-throughs and pop-ups), yeah, those are annoying.