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?
Ads over pay wall BUT with the option to pay to remove ads for a reasonable price. Then I have a way of supporting the content of I enjoy it enough
Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.
Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of “let me throw money at you”. Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn’t an executive.
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.
Banners! I was fine with banners, you can look at them or not if you want, you can click them or not… guess they weren’t profitable anymore.
Ad’s. If a sites using the paywall approach, they’ve made an enemy for life with me.
Now I’m not saying I like ads, but as long as they aren’t aggressive I will tolerate them. If they get to aggressive, I’ll block them.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s a business, but I’m a human with a low tolerance for being jerked around.
This is a complex and nuanced question that is not as black and white as the binary choices you give. Both paywalls and ads, as they are implemented currently, suck and erode away at the usefulness of the Internet.
Paywalls
They typically tease content in the hopes people will be interested enough to pay for the content and other content. Sounds good on the surface, because the people putting in the effort to write articles should be paid. The problem is, the quality of journalism has also eroded to the point where it’s not worth paying for as much as it used to be. Excessive SEO has poisoned search results in such a way that paywalls content crowds out other valid search results. Throw in the fact that there is a possible future where articles may be written by AI, and it’s especially not worth it.
Ads
Ads are intrusive, they can contain malware/viruses, may be inappropriate for an audience (e.g., porn or violence related ads shown to kids). I’ve even had ads redirect the webpage to another website. Using fingerprinting to target “relevant” ads is a privacy nightmare, intrusive, and still is mostly irrelevant to the user. Those cookie pops are annoying as fuck — my guess is it’s malicious compliance with the EU — even when using a site that is based in the US that targets only US citizens. Certain browsers are blurring the lines between useful browser functionality and increasing ad revenue.
Either way you look at it, these companies are eroding public trust in search of the almighty “engagement” dollar. And then they’re all shocked pikachu when people find ways to circumvent paying for content. So they double down on making things as difficult as possible for the end user, which makes the user double down on hating these companies and their malicious practices.
Ads and paywalls can work, but everybody (from publishers/content creators to advertisers and ad networks) need to sit down fix the glaring problems:
- No PII or fingerprinting in any analytics
- Search engines need to either remove paywalls content from results, or flag the result as paywalled and allow users to filter them out
- Journalists need to step up their game and stop writing garbage nobody wants to read
- Ad networks need to be more hands on with making sure ads are appropriate and not malicious in any way
- STOP CROWDING OUT YOUR CONTENT WITH ADS!
I’m sure we all could come up with more solutions. But we all know that all parties involved won’t do a damned thing to make things better for us.
And yet no matter how bad it gets, it still somehow is profitable. So pirating material doesn’t seem to be an effective means of protest because it seems there are enough people out there willing to pay for all of this garbage.
No.
You…realize good journalism costs money, right?
You realize that if newspapers offered a federated service (pay once, you get them all), they’d make money hand over fist?
But noooo…each newspaper wants you to pay.
I’d pay upwards of $20 a month if that guaranteed me access to the major newspapers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, etc.) and my local one with one subscription.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea but it’s interesting how similar that is to cable TV.
Of course, cable TV was largely ad-free at first then you ended up paying for it and getting ads.
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.
The thing is if I see an article that’s blocked by a paywall, I can simply go to another site that has the exact same story for free.
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.
Should be donations. Fuck the corporate internet.
You know that people aren’t forced to interact with websites right? Like if I don’t have a choice about if your website is going to show me ads, then I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE to view your website. Those ones that block the entire page until you whitelist them? I just close them and move on with my life. Nobodys product is so important that I will interrupt my day to view their advertising for it. And no website has such a reputation that I am willing to pay them or whitelist them for advertising BEFORE VIEWING THE FUCKING CONTENT.
I agree I close them if I see that, but just so you know a combo of bypass paywalls clean, and ublock origin (go into settings and enable all cookie notices, social widgets, and annoyances) will bypass 95% of those without you even knowing
If that fails go to web.archive.org and paste the URL, that works most of the time. There’s a web extension called “web archives” that makes this easy if you’re ok with other extensions
Why? Prove to me that your binary is true.
If someone sets up a website, and uses ads to fund it, 99% of the time their goal is profit.
How they profit is their issue, not mine.
Many websites exist without ads, hosted by people who simply want to have a website.
As for paywalls, again, people are creating a profit-generating barrier for something. Again, that’s their concern, not mine. Generally when I hit a paywall I just close the tab. I’m not the sucker they’re looking for.
If I’m really curious, I may run the URL through archive.is
So you think people should just work around the clock making content and not get anything for it? I keep seeing this view and it sounds so naive, you can’t expect donations to keep you afloat. Even hosting the website and domain names cost money.
I wouldn’t mind paying for quality content, but usually you end up paying for crap and seeing ads too. So now the corporate media is double dipping right out of your wallet. Journalism is dead and we’re probably never getting it back.
Alright as far as your argument goes. But what about content that has value for society? I’m talking, of course, among other things, about serious journalism. Do only “suckers” pay for that, too?
Ads, better to see ads and make the information available to all, than have a portion of the population unable to access the information at all.
I wound not mind ads if they met the following conditions (in no particular order).
- Actually vet them, no scams and viruses.
- minimal obstruction to what I’m there for. A bildboard on the side of the highway is fine, but when they put in the road, there’s a problem.
- Mix it up. YouTube playing the same ad 500 times in a row is obnoxious.
- No yelling/loud shit. Play your ad, don’t blow out my speakers.
- If on a silent website, video ads must be auto muted.
- if I’m on data or a metered network, don’t auto play ads and keep the total data usage to a minimum.
- Medical and health ads aren’t allowed. You can have PSAs about conditions and that there are treatment options, but it should your doctor researching and recommending specific medicine not a patient going in with some ad.
Globally disabling autoplay in my browser brought me so much sanity. It’s worth the small fraction of sites that behave badly because of it
Add political ads to the last one too.
99% of the time it’s either an outright lie or stretched exaggeration of the truth. No one is getting any correct information from a political ad except either side’s specific spin on it and it causes a lot of average people to incorrectly believe they are informed on who and what they are voting on that they don’t need to do more due diligence before heading to the polls.
Also favors rich politicians and more well funded campaigns over less well off politicians and less well funded organizations and causes.
Ads. I’ve been online since the age of Gopher. I’ve gone through every kind of ad or a pop-up you can throw at me. Even though I use an adblock, even without it I can subconsciously filter out ads so well that they won’t bother me.
I would rather have ads. If I were to subscribe to every website that asked me to subscribe I would be paying $1,000 a month.
Ads, because even though they waste my time, I still have my money. Also:
I don’t like ads, but for paywalls I just close the page like it was a 404 error.
The question is a bit loaded, since “prefer ads” means you see the content, whereas “prefer paywalls” means you don’t.
A fairer framing would have been: “how do you prefer to pay for content?”
Because, contrary to many opinions here, there is a price to pay when you watch an ad. At the very least, you’re paying with your sanity. And very possibly you’re paying with your wallet too, later, when you buy some product or service you don’t really need. If ads didn’t work, there wouldn’t be so many of them.
Next, in a world where content is funded by advertising, the people who control our tech have an infernal incentive to spy on us - so we all end up paying with our privacy.
Advertising is the lifeblood of consumer capitalism. It’s what powers the pseudo-needs and pseudo-desires and status competition that drives all that material throughput of JUNK that is killing our planet. That price tag is gonna be pretty hefty.
Advertising is sheer poison. But paywalls are not the enemy. It is not immoral to pay for things that have value.
I mean, to be honest a lot of us prefer ads because we use an ad-blocker. I have mixed feelings about either option.
There is such a thing as a tasteful implementation of advertising, but it’s very often overdone and a nuisance. So because so many of them are a nuisance, my general attitude is to block everything. If you want to support a particular cause or creator, you can allow filters in your ad-blocker so you only see ads on that website.
As far as paywalls go, it does resemble the traditional newspaper/magazine subscription model. In theory, I don’t mind financially contributing to a service I use because it means the service continues to prosper. Practically, these fees are often overinflated and a disproportionate amount of the proceeds go to the executive class. Also unlike newspapers, you usually can’t buy just one article, and instead you’re locked into another subscription.
Yeah, I used to not block ads but they’re so invasive these days. If 2 banner ads pop on at the top and bottom of the screen with a full screen app on top with ads between every paragraph and a PIP video ad on top, yeah, I don’t even bother reading the article.
And I sure as hell am not subscribing to a $10/mo subscription because someone linked to a paywalled article either. It’s so crazy those sites just assume every visitor is a recurring visitor that might subscribe. Definitely wish there was some sort of micropayment thing, like pay 25 cents to view it or something.
