cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/4017115
Related material, not all as optimistic as the ABC news article:
With any number of alternative business models.
It’s unfuriating that people actually believe ads can have some kind of positive impact by creating a revenue stream for content.
And how many of those alternative business models:
- Ensure open access to content to anyone, rather than just those with enough disposable income?
- Enable support for content at a variety of different consumption patterns, including (a) niche but dedicated audience, (b) large moderately engaged audience, and © very large drive-by audience (i.e., audience of people who might not expect to access content from you ever again, but show up for this one particular popular thing)?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the option of other revenue streams. Paywalled content has the right to exist, and I pay for some of it myself very happily. So does donation-based content like Patreon and at least some Lemmy instances (including the one I’m on). But advertising works very well, and I have never seen someone suggest an alternative that could ever come close to replacing advertising in terms of the volume and variety of content that is currently available on the Internet.
You’ve pretty much answered your own question - the alternative model is simply no-fee, frictionless, convenient, secure, micro-payments.
If everyone paid $0.001 to, say, read an article content producers would have a lot more revenue than they do presently. I’m truly loathe to say this as I despise everything about crypto, but this is a problem that crypto could address.
The only reason this doesn’t exist is because the advertising model is more lucrative for the corporations that built the modern web.
The OP is talking about ad tracking. The comment I replied to suggested ads should be entirely removed.