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npc_anon | 6 months ago

The problem in your logic is that all points starts wit "I".

You're not the only stakeholder in any of those interactions. There's you, a mediator (search or LLM), and the website owner.

The website owner (or its users) basically do all the work and provide all the value. They produce the content and carry the costs and risks.

The pre-LLM "deal" was that at least some traffic was sent their way, which helps with reach and attempts at monetization. This too is largely a broken and asymmetrical deal where the search engine holds all the cards but it's better than nothing.

A full LLM model that no longer sends traffic to websites means there's zero incentive to have a website in the first place, or it is encouraged to put it behind a login.

I get that users prefer an uncluttered direct answer over manually scanning a puzzling web. But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.

discuss

order

danbruc|6 months ago

But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.

They are already paying, it is the way they are paying that causes the mess. When you buy a product, some fraction of the price is the ad budget that gets then distributed to websites showing ads. Therefore there is also nothing wrong with blocking ads, they have already been paid for, whether you look at them or not. The ad budget will end up somewhere as long as not everyone is blocking all ads, only the distribution will get skewed. Which admittedly might be a problem for websites that have a user base that is disproportionally likely to use ad blockers.

Paying for content directly has the problem that you can only pay for a selected few websites before the amount you have to pay becomes unreasonable. If you read one article on a hundred different websites, you can not realistically pay for a hundred subscriptions that are all priced as if you spent all your time on a single website. Nobody has yet succeeded in creating a web wide payment method that only charges you for the content that you actually consume and is frictionless enough to actually work, i.e. does not force you to make a conscious payment decisions for a few cents or maybe even only fractions of a cent for every link you click and is not a privacy nightmare collecting all the links you click for billing purposes.

Also if you directly pay for content, you will pay twice - you will pay for the subscription and you will still pay into the ad budget with all the stuff you buy.

shortformblog|6 months ago

Publishers don't get paid a dime if you block the ad unless they are doing a direct ad transaction. Adtech has largely made that transaction a rarity for like 30 years.

It's not like newspapers where advertising is paid in full before publishers put stories online. It has not been that way for a long time.

Your reasoning for not accessing advertising reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where, to hide the money they've taken out of the till, they throw away the bananas. It doesn't hide the transaction, it compounds the problem.

If publishers were getting paid before any ads ran the publishing business would be a hell of a lot stronger.

hahn-kev|6 months ago

I feel like this could work if the payment was handled by your ISP. Content provider tells the ISP how much their content costs that there subscribers pay, and the ISP pays them. I already pay my ISP. The real problem is that it's kinda too late for this kind of change. And also the ISP would need to prevent their users from running up a bill that the ISP would be responsible for and without tracking them that's not possible.