One of my first blog posts in a while, I go over Google’s recent web proposal, and point out exactly why it won’t turn out well. Hope y’all have fun with it.
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.
My general cynicism of people as a whole drives my opinion, I suppose. While it can be successful sometimes as you point out, I don’t think enough people would contibute for a donation based model to work in most cases. And people already have subscription fatigue just from online streaming services.
But you know what would be awesome? If I was wrong. Especially about the donation based model. Enough people opting to donate for high quality content that it becomes a viable default? I want that kind of web.
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
