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?
Obviously I don’t like either and I love both ad blockers and tools that bypass paywalls.
But if forced to choose: I prefer ads. Here’s why - there’s no way I could reasonably afford to sign up for and pay for everything, if it was all behind a paywall. So I’d only have access to and be able to save a limited number of articles for myself.
But if it’s just ad heavy, it’s more accessible and I can still save it. The range of what I’d be able to save and retain is much larger this way.
I prefer ads, as I can block them.
Beat me to this comment
I’d accept paywalls If I could pay for a ‘package’ where I have access for all these paywalled websites and each gets money proportional to how often I’ve used them. There’s no way I am going to pay for all these separately.
But there’s no such thing, so I just block ads, and whenever I see a paywalled website I just close it.
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.
Yeah, I want to pay you directly. I, admittedly, pirate things. When those things are good, I make an effort to go send money to the creator directly. Sometimes it’s hard, especially with things like books. I don’t want to buy it on Amazon. And unless someone is self-published, they’re getting peanuts. I’d much rather Venmo an author money direct. When Radiohead released In Rainbows way back when and put it out for “pay what you want,” I gave them five bucks I think.
I understand it can’t always be like that, and that the people between a content creator and me do serve some purpose.
You may want to clarify, as patreon and kickstarter are often used as paywalls. Do you mean people can donate to a cause, and everyone gets the benefits?
The latter, but I also don’t really mind paywalls in the form of “get early access” like SMBC comics or “get exclusive special content” like a lot of bands do.
You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don’t have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn’t crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video
Paywalls, but the content has to be absolutely stellar for me to consider paying for an account.
Neither; use FOSS!
But in all seriousness, ads. They may be filled with trackers from big tech to try to know my every waking thought and sell them, but I have handy dandy software to deal with that.
Ads, because there are too many separate sites implementing paywalls, I don’t like any of them enough more than the others to subscribe.
Reader supported without subscription model is my favorite though - I will and have thrown $5 to Wikipedia, the Guardian, etc. If there was some monthly umbrella one I might consider it, or a $0.25 pay per article but absolutely not $100 a year for one site absolutely no.
Basically I think my overall budget for all sites would be sustainable at $10/month or so, sure. But not that much for ONE site, no.
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.
Companies didn’t vet them, and outside to other as companies. Turns out they didn’t do any due diligence, and let viruses leak through. That’s when people really started blocking them.
Paywalls for news. It makes it easy for me to know that this is not an important news article and can skip reading it. Time saving.
It depends on the implementation, in both cases. I can somewhat tolerate:
- ads that are visually distinct from the actual content, not personalised or targetted, not obstrusive or obnoxious
- paywalls that apply to recent news, but don’t get in your way while you’re looking for older stuff
Go past that and I’m avoiding your ads with uBlock and your paywalls with archive links. And, more importantly: there are other financing methods, such as Patreon.
Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don’t think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.
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
I keep telling people but if they keep using ad blockers, then they can expect less content to be available for free. Yet they all want to act like they’re not responsible for this trend even though they are.
I keep telling advertisers but if they continue using intrusive ads that send information to Facebook or appear after content has loaded forcing us to misclick, then they can expect more people to use ad blockers. Yet they all want to act like they’re not responsible for this trend even though they are.
It’s not that simple, unfortunately. Even if you were concerned about the impact of using an adblocker, the ads are not like billboards, merely visual distractions, but rather ads now include invasive tracking and surveillance, and other malicious code that can freeze or make a website unusable. Ads often create an accessibility nightmare for some users. They also tend to use up data, making the internet less accessible to those in third world countries where internet access is slow and large data are a bigger problem.
There have been some half-hearted attempts to create standards for advertisements, but the reality is that greed has always undermined attempts for the private sector to self-regulate on this issue, so short of some kind of legislative action to curb these problems, you are going to get people trying to protect themselves with adblockers.
they can expect less content to be available for free
Less corporate content. But if big business wants to fuck right off the internet forever, it’s okay by me.
Funny that changing your UA to like Googlebot means you can see the content since website owners want search indexing
I wouldn’t mind paying but once more and more site adopt the subscribtion model, then prices like $10 a month becomes unsustainable when you need dozens of subscribtions. I believe that microtransactions are the future of the internet. All content should cost for you to view but only a little bit so that it adds up to like 20 - 50 bucks a month and the money goes mostly to the creators rather than platform.
that sounds horrible
Yeah would be nice if everything was free, wouldn’t it?
That’s how the internet worked before big corporations jumped in.
It worked great.
Academia would like a word.
