Does Wikipedia count as a big content website? n=1 and all that, but I think it's a decent example of how things that are actually useful do just fine[1] without ads.
This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist. The 20xx equivalent of checkout aisle gossip mags going quietly into that good night is a feature, not a bug.
Beyond that, think about how many of the ills of the modern internet can be traced back to advertising profit motive. Shitty clickbait journalism? Yep. Engagement-optimized filter bubbles and radicalization machines? Check. Fake news (of the traditional definition)? Practically the poster child. Indiscriminate data collection? Of course. I admit that I'm far from a typical internet user, but from my point of view the death of ad-supported services is an unalloyed good.
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[1] Much of the funding from Wikipedia drives goes to other efforts of the foundation. The frequency and tone of drives might imply some precariousness, but taken alone Wikipedia is fairly firmly in the green.
> This might sound harsh, but if people are unwilling to pay for something with any currency they don't implicitly count as worthless, maybe it shouldn't exist.
That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination. This stance seems pretty closely similar in effect to "The only things that should exist are the interests of the rich."
I agree there are a lot of societal illnesses (even beyond those mentioned in the OP) that trace back to ad-supported websites, but ads have been the main reason information has been available to average people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century. I think if we want to replace them, we need to be thoughtful about how to do better.
> That's essentially every news source that isn't purely propaganda with billionaires footing the bill for its dissemination.
I guess if you're feeling optimistic an argument could be made that the public broadcasting services of various nations provide a counterexample, although their political independence/status as maybe-not-propoganda is frequently contentious. The emergence of various low-budget OSINT-type outfits like Bellingcat is another indication that the future of investigative reporting doesn't necessarily have to exist within the current framework of media as ad-driven profit engine. Mass connectivity cuts both ways: obtaining and synthesizing relevant info is a lot easier when you can go pull videos of war crimes off of Twitter instead of shipping out an expensive war correspondent. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that this sort of thing will ever be a complete replacement for old-fashioned professional journalism.
> ads have been the main reason information has been available to average people for literally decades now, dating back to print and broadcast media in the 20th century.
One significant difference between then and now is that the cost of distribution of information is approaching zero. In the 20th century, much of what your newspaper's ads were funding was the physical newspaper itself. Broadcasting equipment was prohibitively expensive and you had to go through the FCC (and hope you were one of the ~epsilon sanctioned outlets) to not get shut down. Today, any CDN will happily sell you the bandwidth for millions of page views for a song. This definitely doesn't mean that good journalism is free to produce, but there's a lot of overhead that was being supported by the ad model that doesn't necessarily apply these days.
I agree that some form of revenue replacement is in order, but I hope that these and similar considerations mean that the gap that needs filling is smaller than a naive "well, ads made this much in FY 2018, better spin up micropayments for 100% of that" analysis would suggest.
To be fair the clickbait is a matter of incentives and essentially also exists in pure cash transactions and has existed since newsprint - they were called eyecatching headlines and yellow journalism.
How many are necessary, or even desirable, and not a net drain on human happiness by optimizing for endless engagement? I don't like the direction in which the ad-supported model is pushing content.
Internet pre-advertising had plenty of useful and interesting sites. And Wikipedia is ad-free as well. And without the competition of zero-cost ad-supported commercial sites, other business models would rise to take their place.
What I find odd about this is that there does exist at least one perfectly fine micropayment system. It's running in my laundromat (the company is Heartland Micropayments), where I can use my credit/debit or laundry payment card. When I wash and dry three loads of laundry, I don't get 6 charges on my card. I get one.
It seems like it wouldn't be a huge amount of work to bring this to the internet, particularly since it's using the internet for its communication in the first place.
Batching small payments is not the hard part of creating a payment system that can support the entire Web. Harder parts include problems like UX (e.g. balancing the need to make a system people will want to use against the danger of users unknowingly running up a huge bill), getting buy-in from websites (why should they use your service in particular?), and just convincing people to sign up for yet another godforsaken account on the Internet.
