I started to notice that more sites are turning into paywalls, and I don’t like that and would prefer ads over subscriptions.
I am curious, what does the general community think about that?
No.
No what?
To both obviously.
A more genuine response would be “Ads, so I can use an adblocker on them.”
Fuck advertisers. FUUUUUUUUUUUCK paywals.
But unless we are talking about very few non-profit news organizations, you have to choose one of them.
Should be donations. Fuck the corporate internet.
How much money do you donate to your ad-free lemmy instance? Or the rest of the free services you’re using?
For the vast majority of people, that number is $0.
I donate free labor by administrating it.
maybe for-profit news organizations should get another business model. My computer is a temple and merchants can get out.
My computer is a temple and merchants can get out.
Gotta steal this one and start using it.
Paywalls, but the content has to be absolutely stellar for me to consider paying for an account.
False dichotomy, I’d rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don’t need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.
Ads, because there are too many separate sites implementing paywalls, I don’t like any of them enough more than the others to subscribe.
Reader supported without subscription model is my favorite though - I will and have thrown $5 to Wikipedia, the Guardian, etc. If there was some monthly umbrella one I might consider it, or a $0.25 pay per article but absolutely not $100 a year for one site absolutely no.
Basically I think my overall budget for all sites would be sustainable at $10/month or so, sure. But not that much for ONE site, no.
Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don’t think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.
Paywalls for news. It makes it easy for me to know that this is not an important news article and can skip reading it. Time saving.
Neither; use FOSS!
But in all seriousness, ads. They may be filled with trackers from big tech to try to know my every waking thought and sell them, but I have handy dandy software to deal with that.
Obviously I don’t like either and I love both ad blockers and tools that bypass paywalls.
But if forced to choose: I prefer ads. Here’s why - there’s no way I could reasonably afford to sign up for and pay for everything, if it was all behind a paywall. So I’d only have access to and be able to save a limited number of articles for myself.
But if it’s just ad heavy, it’s more accessible and I can still save it. The range of what I’d be able to save and retain is much larger this way.
I keep telling people but if they keep using ad blockers, then they can expect less content to be available for free. Yet they all want to act like they’re not responsible for this trend even though they are.
they can expect less content to be available for free
Less corporate content. But if big business wants to fuck right off the internet forever, it’s okay by me.
I keep telling advertisers but if they continue using intrusive ads that send information to Facebook or appear after content has loaded forcing us to misclick, then they can expect more people to use ad blockers. Yet they all want to act like they’re not responsible for this trend even though they are.
It’s not that simple, unfortunately. Even if you were concerned about the impact of using an adblocker, the ads are not like billboards, merely visual distractions, but rather ads now include invasive tracking and surveillance, and other malicious code that can freeze or make a website unusable. Ads often create an accessibility nightmare for some users. They also tend to use up data, making the internet less accessible to those in third world countries where internet access is slow and large data are a bigger problem.
There have been some half-hearted attempts to create standards for advertisements, but the reality is that greed has always undermined attempts for the private sector to self-regulate on this issue, so short of some kind of legislative action to curb these problems, you are going to get people trying to protect themselves with adblockers.
