tikitaki

yeah it’s still a sort of new frontier but the patreon model I think really should be the way going forward assuming it’s possible. everybody gets the content for free, but those who can afford to contribute do so. and to be honest, if you live in a 1st world country throwing a couple bucks here and there isn’t that much to ask. for the same price of a lunch at mcdonalds you can give $3 a month for nearly half a year to Wikipedia for example

but it’s not really viable for the internet as a whole right? Hoping for some spare change from a tiny fraction of your visitors

Why not? It works for kbin/lemmy instances. It works for Wikipedia. It works for Lichess.

Sure, some things like video hosting are going to require a lot more bandwidth / server storage so perhaps those need to be subscription based but I think large swathes of the internet could be turned into a donation/subscription model. it just isn’t done that way because it’s less profitable.

look at which video games are the most profitable - it’s always the free ones. fortnite, league of legends, etc.

Users don’t use adblockers because they don’t want to see ads at all; they they use adblockers because getting a usable web experience requires it.

Users don’t block advertisements; they block annoying advertisements. They block trackers. They block malware. They block privacy invasion.

I block advertisements because I don’t want to see any advertisements. They are poison for the mind and I want to eliminate any form of advertisement I can control. Obviously you can’t avoid a lot of it - but I can definitely avoid it in my web browser.

I would prefer a subscription based model or a donation based model. For example Wikipedia or Lichess I’ve donated to because I believe they provide a good service and show no ads. Or for example Kagi which is a search engine that charges a monthly fee.