I can’t help but think of a comparison with print newspapers, which undoubtedly is where the idea of funding the internet through ads started. It made a certain sense: newspapers and magazines partially support themselves through adverts, so websites (particularly those with regularly updated content) could also rely on ad revenue.
But the big difference is that with a print newspaper, the customer pays to buy the paper, and the customer also has the choice to not look at the ads. I’ve got a print newspaper subscription. All the ads are clustered together on a few specific pages, not interspersed amongst the real content, which allows me to just skip right past them.
Ads on the internet, however, have become increasingly insidious over the years, often blocking access to the website’s real content. And the more obnoxious they are and the harder they are for people to avoid, the more likely people are to utilise adblockers, because ultimately they want to see ads on the internet about as much as I want to read the adverts page in the newspaper (apart from the personal ads, those are a good giggle). Forcing people to look at content they don’t want to look at is always going to end badly.
I’m quite happy for the ad-based internet to die. Websites with good content and good communities don’t need revenue from adverts, because they will always have support from the communities they create. Most people aren’t averse to donating even a few {currency of choice} to help keep something they love running, especially when they know it’s not an extractive, exploitative business model.
I think this is a problem of the capitalist system the ad-based websites exist in. There is an expectation for continuous growth, and if showing ads is the main source of income, the only way to grow after a certain point (user base not growing a lot any more) is to be more and more intrusive to shove more and more ads in the users faces. At some point we’re fed up with the ads to the point it is not worth visiting the site anymore.
If growth weren’t expected we could have stopped at a reasonable level of ads that are not as intrusive and had a steady income to cover the cost of running the site as long as the users are satisfied. But unfortunately everything anyone wants to use the internet for these days becomes a get rich quick scheme, causing the eventual enshittification of most sites.
This is why I like self hosted services, community funded, non profits, etc. For example wikipedia, and beehaw 🙂. It feels good donating when I can trust that the site owners have good intentions. It does not feel good to pay a subscription to a mega-corporation to avoid ads.
