I’ve always thought that the ad supported internet is something people will eventually get sick of and the financial foundation would evolve over time to find models that don’t rely on infinite spam. Instead efforts are focussed on forcing us to view them. At this point I’m expecting the next version of Chrome to require the Ludovico technique while browsing.

I mean, many (several?) sites tried optional subscriptions where you pay to get rid of ads, but that doesn’t seem to have worked. Judging by the fact that most sites that have subscriptions instead of ads use pay walls.

People have come to expect free access, so if you can easily use an ad blocker, why would you choose to pay to remove the ads that a blocker removes for free.

IMHO the problem is the same one as everywhere. Companies are no longer interested in creating products, they are only interested in creating revenue streams. I’ve been working on my finances lately and it’s incredible how many ‘products’ have become subscriptions over time.

I’d love to be able to buy a day’s access, or access to an article. If I want to share it, I’m willing to pay a small fee to show it to certain folks. I feel like there could be a market there but in the current financial climate it would never get any interest or backing because it wouldn’t be a method to capture people into a reoccurring billing cycle.

Something I think is interesting is that, in order for companies to adopt these better non ad reliant models, they would have to dramatically scale down.

In a climate where ad and clicks = revenue, your solution is to scale as large as you can and pump out content to maximize views. But that wouldn’t work under normal models