Maybe your app just isn't worth the downsides of building an unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. I'm sorry =/ If we destroy the panopticon, perhaps we can find new business models that aren't as destructive.
What about it? Most of the big names seem to be switching to a paywall model, which is fine with me. A local outlet has an almost entirely reader-supported model that seems to be working for them[1]. There are options other than the global surveillance panopticon, and the more we support those options, the more viable they will become.
As someone who works with a national news outlet, I can tell your for certain that paywalls are failing, and we're now considering how to recoup lost revenue with ads that don't pay as well as they did five years ago.
That sucks, but I'm still zero percent interested in supporting the unaccountable, global surveillance panopticon. Don't blame me that Facebook & Google destroyed your business model!
I don't know. I think the best approach would be to ban surveillance capitalism, (e.g. make gathering personal data illegal), and then new business models would fall out out of the new situation. More likely, old business models would re-appear: selling ads to relevant publications (e.g. video game ads on video game websites), instead of targeted to users; selling products direct to customers instead of funding via ads (this is currently difficult because the surveillance business model out-competes it).
Another approach could be to break up the big tech companies into a bunch of tiny pieces, and hope something more ethical comes out of the more distributed market power & natural competition.
I'm not a marxist by any means, but breaking up the monopoly into smaller companies might make sense. The newspapers before them had similar regulations and faired well.
I think you need a more nuanced take than "journalism is dying" – a more accurate take might be that journalism is centralizing for professionals (NYT, major cable networks have scarcely ever been doing better... don't take my word for it, read the financial statements) and decentralizing for amateurs (substack, twitter, etc.).
Journalism is evolving and changing, but it isn't dying or going away. Hyper-targeted ads will not "save journalism".
News sites can't compete with big tech companies on targeted ads, they're at a systemic disadvantage.
News sites have to spend X% of their margin to continuously generate content to attract viewers, while big tech companies spend 0 to attract viewers because viewers are the generators of their content. For this fundamental reason, news sites never be able to compete on targeting granularity or ad pricing.
Rather than fighting a losing battle, it's better to put your chips behind a battle where you have a differentiated advantage (in the NYT/Cable News companies, it's the cornered resource of accredited voices in reporting and editorial).
It would be net-negative to try to compete in the space targeted ads. They'd be better off offering low-revenue, low-cost blanket ads (i.e. advertise in the "automotive" section of the website to non-subscribers), where the cost to the ad operator is effectively zero because they don't have to maintain a database of user ad profiles.
