[bhargav]

This is one of those things where interests of the consumer are at odds with that of the business. Businesses need money, customers have money. Customers do not always want to pay the businesses directly. This issue is more obvious when it comes to news media. We don't have a good solution to pay $0.01 - $0.10 or whatever small denomination. The other question is would we even want to?

I don’t think Freemium or whatever subscription model solves these problems beyond the scope of a single website. I am interested to hear how this can be solved for consumers for whole swaths of websites that have ads.

It’s pretty easy to say ads are evi, but I personally don’t know a good solution.

[immibis]

I subscribe to YouTube Premium (from back when it was called YouTube Red). I pay a fixed amount each month, and that gets given to people who made videos I watch. Why can't we have more things like this?

[bhargav]

Because you are an active consumer of YouTube to the point where you think it’s worth it to pay the monthly fee; as do I.

However, I seldom read any news articles maybe 1-2 here and there only. In that case I wouldn’t want to pay for a susscriotion. I likely also don’t wanna pay like five bucks to read an article.

[eqmvii]

ostensibly because after years of experiments, ads get more revenue in most circumstances.