[chronogram]

News would still exist and would not be competing with engagement driven news because there's no engagement=ad views. I wager it would be very helpful to news.

TV would absolutely still exist, given that people pay for it and there is a big industry around ad-free streaming services already.

[LunaSea]

Almost no online newspaper survives from subscriptions.

Non public broadcasters are rarely if ever and free. Meaning that their business model requires this as revenue to survive.

[wat10000]

They have to compete with ad-funded competition. This doesn’t tell us about the viability of this approach in a world where the ad-funded model isn’t viable.

[azemetre]

If there is such a small ability for the average person to make SMB viable without massive subsidies by advertisers maybe it's time to argue that there should be more public investment and grants given to independent journalists that meet a certain criteria.

[thelaxiankey]

i'd say the success of substack flies directly in the face of your claim

[makeitdouble]

For news, I feel it's another can of worm altogether.

Right now we've already having oligarchs owning news groups and very few independent publications. But getting rid of other revenue sources won't help that situation, we'd get more Washington Post or New York Times than Buffalo's Fire.

It's a lot easier IMHO to have an independent newsroom if the business side can advertise for toilet paper and dating sites than if it needs to convince Jeff Bezos of its value to him.

And investigation journalism costs a lot while not getting valued by many, there's no way we get a set of paid-only-by-viewers papers from all relevant spectrums covering most of the news happening every day.