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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   47856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I'd gladly pay $0.003 to read a web page if they offered a convenient way to replace their advertising revenue. In fact, I am paying more than that because they created horrifically bloated sytems that pass through some of the most expensive data transfer in the Western world. My adblocker blocks about 10% of the requests and the cost of data is about 17x the benefit of the advertising, so running an adblocker is economically efficient even before you consider the cost of seeing them (at $20/GB, 2.5 MB/page, $3.00 CPM).

Aside from that, I can do what I want with the things they send me. I can channel surf or leave the room to avoid TV commercials, skip to the articles in magazines, or scrape the logos off of physical products. Do you think that those forms of ad-avoidance are immoral in the same way?

EDIT: fixed strikethrough

Tumblr have done this, which I personally think is kind of sneaky, but others approve: if you want the ad-free experience, you can sign up to a subscription.

I'm sticking with my adblocker, but at least that option is there for people who don't want ads but do want to contribute to the expenses of running the site. Were it a smaller operation, I might consider a sub, but not for something that has been passed around like a hot potato in the hopes of making money out of it for big companies. They managed to flog it for $1 billion back in the day, if it went for only $3 million the last time its owners sold it on, that's on them.

The fact that there's still no convenient tools to do nanotransactions like that (although the Brave Browser makes a try at it) when you just want to view a particular page but have zero interest in a subscription, membership, or indeed even registering an account makes me assume there are some major barriers to its functionality.

Seriously. I visit a site, they want to get paid for the pages I view, then prompt me with a box that has the option to either watch an Ad or pay .3 cents or hell, even 3 cents per page I view, and it can be instantly charged to my account, I'd do it. IF I don't have to go through the process of registering an account, connecting it to my bank, and managing a separate account for every individual site.

This is probably why Substack immediately swallowed the entire blogging industry, since it enables something close to this for supporting writers you like without having to jump through 10 hoops each time you want to contribute to one of them.

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