A lot of sites wouldn’t exist without ads, because they want their stuff to be freely-accessible and don’t have any other revenue streams. It would also cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.

The only business models that have really worked online have been:

1. Ad-supported.
2. You pay for the service yourself, like a monthly subscription.
3. Someone else pays for the service for you, for example freemium services (paid users subsidize the free users), a lot of Lemmy servers (admins cover the hosting costs), etc.

If ads go away, a lot of sites/services would have to become paid services, and smaller ones might just shut down entirely. We’d end up with even more consolidation of the market.

I think donation/investment based freemium is the future of internet content once the bots kill ad viability

Yeah, my shareware did real well - 800 hours in development, $500 in income across the past 30 years. Oh, and it cost me $400 for the compiler tools back then - so my net profit is rolling in at $0.12 per hour invested. Warning: $440 of that $500 came from an extreme niche product you’re unlikely to find such a lucrative vein anymore. My game only netted $60 in return for 400 hours of development, but you could say I got the compiler “for free” off that niche product’s income.

That sounds like the vast majority of “app” developers.

These things are a casino market.

I’ve tried that before, but barely anyone donates. People expect the world for free.

Once something is perceived as free as the internet has been for ever. It is very hard to get people to pay for it.

I think people will eventually have to get used to paying for things though, if bots / AI / ad blockers kill off the feasibility of online advertising. Either that or everything becoming a freemium service with major limits for free users.

cut off lower income people that couldn’t afford to pay.

There’s a shot of irony in there… Google doesn’t monetize poor people highly at all, but the poor people get “free” access with ads because some richer people also allow themselves to see the ads. What kind of communism is that?

It’s the same way that taxes work. Rich people contribute more than poorer people, but everyone can use things funded by public money (parks, police, fire fighters, public transport, schools, health care outside the USA, etc).

I actually wonder if there should be more taxpayer-funded online services. Lemmy’s development was partially funded by government money (NLNet Foundation via the European Commission) for example.

We could live without anything that uses ads to “sustain” itself. Nobody hosting ads on their service is doing so to “maintain” themselves. They just want profit for their labour… they are entitled too, but its a business choice, never a necessity.

And yeah if I use something, I’ll always pay for no ads. Ads cost so much more of our lifespans and contribute so fucking little to those that host them. Garbage.

I respect your take, but I think it is wrong.

I don’t particularly think it’s a better change, but CloudFlare is thinking of other options, and with how widespread their use is, if they start doing it, so will everyone else:

blog.cloudflare.com/monetization-gateway/

That is a really good idea. I’m not gonna lie. I would love it if I could put like five bucks in a wallet and then it just takes a cent or two when I go to some article rather than having to fight through some local news site trying to get me to pay $9.99 a month to read one piece of rage bait. I’ll pay a nickel or maybe even a dime for a good one.

I know they’re targeting AI agents, but it is only a matter of time. I say roll it out to consumers dude and I know that sounds fucked up, but like I would much rather just pay a nickel or a dime here and there than have ads making it impossible to even read the article. The people will compete on price and I bet it will stay really small for most stuff. It gets creators paid in a similar model to YouTube clicks or Spotify streams, but in a much more direct and equitable way. Google, AI has to pay for the content instead of just handing it over.

I’m with you. My concern is that I haven’t yet figured out how it’s gonna be ruined for private consumers by corporate consumers yet, so can’t know how to prepare lol.

You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.

Last year, you’d be correct. This year, bots DO purchase things. They also download and run things. Some marketers have gotten wise and have adjusted SEO and general product advertising to appeal to bots.

Where did we go wrong?

Once upon a time, a bunch of primates came down from the trees and now we have unstoppable climate change.

Thanks aliens

In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. – Some Hoopy Frood

Has anyone tried moving around little green bits of paper? Or no because on the whole it isn’t the little green bits of paper that are unhappy?

has*

We let people become rich without eating them when they did bad things.

We gave normies access to the internet at anytime.

Some would say it was coming down from the trees.

I’ve read a pretty convincing take that it was shoes

It’s complicated.

In short, yes.

When we developed culture, it began the uncoupling of our abilities from the capacity of our brains. All other problems stem from this!

I think it was when we started organizing into walled cities surrounded by agricultural lands… that was really conditioning to a miserable way of life (for most, benefitting only a few) that carries through all the way to today.

We thought tech would improve our lives. And allowed companies to do anything they wanted for decades because don’t want to hinder progress. And no regulation on companies purchases.

For whom are they purchasing things?

Their techno fascist overlords, not for consumption, just to keep the propaganda space up so their have a space to control the narrative.

Advertisers might find a way to sneak ads into prompt injections or something