Do you prefer ads or paywalls?
I started to notice that more sites are turning into paywalls, and I don't like that and would prefer ads over subscriptions.
I am curious, what does the general community think about that?
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I started to notice that more sites are turning into paywalls, and I don't like that and would prefer ads over subscriptions.
I am curious, what does the general community think about that?
No.
You.....realize good journalism costs money, right?
Yeah, "good journalism" is definitely what you're paying for with ads or paywalls.
To be clear, I support journalists - and they deserve to get paid for their efforts.
But (a) OP didn't specifically mention news sites, and (b) the revenue from websites via ads or paywalls is going directly into the coffers of the ultra-wealthy. Find me a news outlet that successfully implemented a paywall and then started paying their journalists and reporters vastly more money.
You won't, because they don't.
You realize that if newspapers offered a federated service (pay once, you get them all), they'd make money hand over fist?
But noooo...each newspaper wants you to pay.
I'd pay upwards of $20 a month if that guaranteed me access to the major newspapers (NYT, WaPo, LA Times, etc.) and my local one with one subscription.
Your local library might give you free digital access to most (or all) of those, if you haven’t checked.
I’m not saying it’s a bad idea but it’s interesting how similar that is to cable TV.
Of course, cable TV was largely ad-free at first then you ended up paying for it and getting ads.
I do this with Apple News. Not sure if anything like it exists, but what worries me is Apple cut their News development staff recently which makes me think people (at least Apple users) don’t value journalism enough to support it.
Apple is worth THREE AND A HALF TRILLION DOLLARS!!!
Say that again. Three and a half trillion dollars.
They have cash-on-hand reserves of in excess of $60bn. They could give every single employee $200,000 and still have half of it in the bank.
Tim Cook is a relative pauper in the CEO game, with a net worth upwards of two billion. He could personally pay a team of a three thousand reporters with full benefits and remain a billionaire.
It's not people refusing to pay for journalism, it's robber barons refusing to pay journalists.
To both obviously.
A more genuine response would be "Ads, so I can use an adblocker on them."
Fuck advertisers. FUUUUUUUUUUUCK paywals.
maybe for-profit news organizations should get another business model. My computer is a temple and merchants can get out.
Gotta steal this one and start using it.
Should be donations. Fuck the corporate internet.
How much money do you donate to your ad-free lemmy instance? Or the rest of the free services you’re using?
For the vast majority of people, that number is $0.
I donate free labor by administrating it.
You know that people aren't forced to interact with websites right? Like if I don't have a choice about if your website is going to show me ads, then I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE to view your website. Those ones that block the entire page until you whitelist them? I just close them and move on with my life. Nobodys product is so important that I will interrupt my day to view their advertising for it. And no website has such a reputation that I am willing to pay them or whitelist them for advertising BEFORE VIEWING THE FUCKING CONTENT.
I agree I close them if I see that, but just so you know a combo of bypass paywalls clean, and ublock origin (go into settings and enable all cookie notices, social widgets, and annoyances) will bypass 95% of those without you even knowing
If that fails go to web.archive.org and paste the URL, that works most of the time. There's a web extension called "web archives" that makes this easy if you're ok with other extensions
No, you really really really don't.
I'm old enough to have been online when commercial content was illegal, and I've watched as aggressive commerce has crept into every single corner of the internet.
You don't need to have ads to support a website, you need ads to profit from a website. The idea that everything - information, news, community, society - not only CAN be monetized but MUST be monetized is relatively new, destructive, and anti-human.
The mere idea that you have to choose between two ways of throwing money at billionaires is a symptom of the terminal stages of capitalism. We're going to have a rough 50 years or so, but this has to end.
Why? Prove to me that your binary is true.
If someone sets up a website, and uses ads to fund it, 99% of the time their goal is profit.
How they profit is their issue, not mine.
Many websites exist without ads, hosted by people who simply want to have a website.
As for paywalls, again, people are creating a profit-generating barrier for something. Again, that's their concern, not mine. Generally when I hit a paywall I just close the tab. I'm not the sucker they're looking for.
If I'm really curious, I may run the URL through archive.is
So you think people should just work around the clock making content and not get anything for it? I keep seeing this view and it sounds so naive, you can't expect donations to keep you afloat. Even hosting the website and domain names cost money.
I wouldn't mind paying for quality content, but usually you end up paying for crap and seeing ads too. So now the corporate media is double dipping right out of your wallet. Journalism is dead and we're probably never getting it back.
Okay, so you never go back to ye olde shitty website because they are absolute scum. Now you keep getting to pay the quality content for making the stuff you enjoy without even touching your wallet.
People always have.
How many people get paid to go to ham radio clubs, to write up plans for model airplanes, or to share telescope mirror polishing techniques? How many people try to profit off of community seed/plant exchanges?
The only difference is that people are now looking for venues to generate profit by producing content, rather than producing content for its own sake. The concept of "every sharing of information must be financially profitable" is a sickness - a festering disease.
Domain names cost about $50/year. Self-hosting can be done for free with most ISPs; and if you're getting enough traffic that you need to pay for hosting, it starts pretty cheaply.
Profit is destroying community at every turn. Resist the relentless lust to make an extra buck, and ENGAGE with people.
Wanting to stay alive is not a "relentless lust to make an extra buck". You're portraying people wanting to earn money as villains trying to abuse you. Putting ads in a website where someone puts so much effort to create is NOT evil. Youtubers without sponsorships for example simply wouldn't exist, because nobody would put in dozens of hours of work a week if it wasn't lucrative.
I would argue the concept of expecting everyone else's hard work to be free is selfish. I'm not talking about major publications that have millions of dollars, I'm talking about small websites where the creator needs it to succeed or else it shuts down a year later.
What you're describing is a hobby that people with free time and extra money do. This isn't what 99.9% of content creators work on or have the capability of doing.
Alright as far as your argument goes. But what about content that has value for society? I'm talking, of course, among other things, about serious journalism. Do only "suckers" pay for that, too?
The thing is if I see an article that's blocked by a paywall, I can simply go to another site that has the exact same story for free.
I would rather have ads. If I were to subscribe to every website that asked me to subscribe I would be paying $1,000 a month.
Ad’s. If a sites using the paywall approach, they’ve made an enemy for life with me.
Now I’m not saying I like ads, but as long as they aren’t aggressive I will tolerate them. If they get to aggressive, I’ll block them.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand it’s a business, but I’m a human with a low tolerance for being jerked around.
I wound not mind ads if they met the following conditions (in no particular order).
Globally disabling autoplay in my browser brought me so much sanity. It's worth the small fraction of sites that behave badly because of it
Add political ads to the last one too.
99% of the time it’s either an outright lie or stretched exaggeration of the truth. No one is getting any correct information from a political ad except either side’s specific spin on it and it causes a lot of average people to incorrectly believe they are informed on who and what they are voting on that they don’t need to do more due diligence before heading to the polls.
Also favors rich politicians and more well funded campaigns over less well off politicians and less well funded organizations and causes.
thank goodness most browsers disable autoplay with sound now
False dichotomy, I'd rather see other funding models like Patreon/Kickstarter. Paying gets you early access/bonus stuff/whatever, and you don't need intrusive technologies like ads/paywalls.
Yeah, I want to pay you directly. I, admittedly, pirate things. When those things are good, I make an effort to go send money to the creator directly. Sometimes it's hard, especially with things like books. I don't want to buy it on Amazon. And unless someone is self-published, they're getting peanuts. I'd much rather Venmo an author money direct. When Radiohead released In Rainbows way back when and put it out for "pay what you want," I gave them five bucks I think.
I understand it can't always be like that, and that the people between a content creator and me do serve some purpose.
You may want to clarify, as patreon and kickstarter are often used as paywalls. Do you mean people can donate to a cause, and everyone gets the benefits?
The latter, but I also don't really mind paywalls in the form of "get early access" like SMBC comics or "get exclusive special content" like a lot of bands do.
You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don't have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn't crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video
I don't like ads, but for paywalls I just close the page like it was a 404 error.
I prefer ads, as I can block them.
Beat me to this comment
I'd accept paywalls If I could pay for a 'package' where I have access for all these paywalled websites and each gets money proportional to how often I've used them. There's no way I am going to pay for all these separately.
But there's no such thing, so I just block ads, and whenever I see a paywalled website I just close it.
I can block ads 100% reliably, and haven't seen one, except in streams where the streamer had to watch one, or someone else's device, in years. Paywalls are much harder to circumvent and need a whole plethora of extensions and 3rd party sites, instead of just uBlock + FF.
Fresh air.
Ga, go outside? No way man 😱
You assumed that, along with assuming your binary is true.
If that's what you meant, then that's what you should've posted.
Your binary isn't true, and there will always be ways to block ads.
Honestly, paywalls. I'll just not use anything not FOSS then. Ads are much more annoying and 99% of times brainrot.
I mean, to be honest a lot of us prefer ads because we use an ad-blocker. I have mixed feelings about either option.
There is such a thing as a tasteful implementation of advertising, but it's very often overdone and a nuisance. So because so many of them are a nuisance, my general attitude is to block everything. If you want to support a particular cause or creator, you can allow filters in your ad-blocker so you only see ads on that website.
As far as paywalls go, it does resemble the traditional newspaper/magazine subscription model. In theory, I don't mind financially contributing to a service I use because it means the service continues to prosper. Practically, these fees are often overinflated and a disproportionate amount of the proceeds go to the executive class. Also unlike newspapers, you usually can't buy just one article, and instead you're locked into another subscription.
Yeah, I used to not block ads but they're so invasive these days. If 2 banner ads pop on at the top and bottom of the screen with a full screen app on top with ads between every paragraph and a PIP video ad on top, yeah, I don't even bother reading the article.
And I sure as hell am not subscribing to a $10/mo subscription because someone linked to a paywalled article either. It's so crazy those sites just assume every visitor is a recurring visitor that might subscribe. Definitely wish there was some sort of micropayment thing, like pay 25 cents to view it or something.
This is the worst thing about it, they're only offering subscriptions. Newspapers kind of faded away from popular use before I was really old enough to be likely to get them, but I did used to buy some print magazines, they were great. If I had some time to kill or knew I'd be on a flight I could choose to buy ONE issue for one article, and by virtue of my tastes the rest of the magazine would be stuff I'd want to read as well and could come back and read anytime. They often had ads in then even though I'd paid and other than the fact that a proportion of the pages I'd paid for didn't have readable material, those were fine too, you just skipped past them. They were "relevant" in so far as they were paid for be advertisers who correctly presumed people who read this or that publication would probably be more interested in these products and services, but they didn't have any ability to literally spy on me in ways that frankly would and should have been illegal using equivalent tools to have done so at the time.
I am not going to subscribe to your random website or online publication because I wanted to read about this one topic and I hate the damn ads that make reading it impossible and require deliberately allowing things that you should never allow on your device for the ads to work how the publisher wants them. This is difficult because it makes me part of the problem, as I'm blocking the ads and either bypassing paywalls or mentally deleting having even encountered the website that presented one to me and immediately closing the page.
To actually help fund the service I'm going to need a way to make ultra small payments of a few cents for individual articles, (probably wouldn't work because of processing fees) or more likely something like a subscription but not to a publication, to a service that will allow access to a range of publications and doles out money to them based on which content I consumed over a time period. It's just no longer realistic, if it ever was, to expect me to want to religiously consume media from one specific publisher. This idea kind of sucks for media companies who are currently getting squeezed by social media and search giants and who sit between them and their audience and suck up all the ad revenue for the content they didn't even produce and now with my idea you'd have that and an additional third party sucking up subscription money they would have traditionally courted directly from the consumer but I don't realistically see much of a choice.
Banners! I was fine with banners, you can look at them or not if you want, you can click them or not.. guess they weren't profitable anymore.
Companies didn't vet them, and outside to other as companies. Turns out they didn't do any due diligence, and let viruses leak through. That's when people really started blocking them.
Ads, because even though they waste my time, I still have my money. Also:
Ads, tastefully. Many websites have too many in too many places, pretty much asking for the viewers to use an ad blocker.
Paywalls for news. It makes it easy for me to know that this is not an important news article and can skip reading it. Time saving.
Ads over pay wall BUT with the option to pay to remove ads for a reasonable price. Then I have a way of supporting the content of I enjoy it enough
It depends on the implementation, in both cases. I can somewhat tolerate:
Go past that and I'm avoiding your ads with uBlock and your paywalls with archive links. And, more importantly: there are other financing methods, such as Patreon.
Ads, better to see ads and make the information available to all, than have a portion of the population unable to access the information at all.
Ads, because there are too many separate sites implementing paywalls, I don't like any of them enough more than the others to subscribe.
Reader supported without subscription model is my favorite though - I will and have thrown $5 to Wikipedia, the Guardian, etc. If there was some monthly umbrella one I might consider it, or a $0.25 pay per article but absolutely not $100 a year for one site absolutely no.
Basically I think my overall budget for all sites would be sustainable at $10/month or so, sure. But not that much for ONE site, no.
Ads. If done well, I may even see it. I am talking about the ad just being an embedded GIF with a href set on it so that clicking it goes to the advertiser's site. Simple privacy-respecting ads.
Example: https://lowendbox.com/
Look at the right and scroll down.
This is a complex and nuanced question that is not as black and white as the binary choices you give. Both paywalls and ads, as they are implemented currently, suck and erode away at the usefulness of the Internet.
Paywalls
They typically tease content in the hopes people will be interested enough to pay for the content and other content. Sounds good on the surface, because the people putting in the effort to write articles should be paid. The problem is, the quality of journalism has also eroded to the point where it’s not worth paying for as much as it used to be. Excessive SEO has poisoned search results in such a way that paywalls content crowds out other valid search results. Throw in the fact that there is a possible future where articles may be written by AI, and it’s especially not worth it.
Ads
Ads are intrusive, they can contain malware/viruses, may be inappropriate for an audience (e.g., porn or violence related ads shown to kids). I’ve even had ads redirect the webpage to another website. Using fingerprinting to target “relevant” ads is a privacy nightmare, intrusive, and still is mostly irrelevant to the user. Those cookie pops are annoying as fuck — my guess is it’s malicious compliance with the EU — even when using a site that is based in the US that targets only US citizens. Certain browsers are blurring the lines between useful browser functionality and increasing ad revenue.
Either way you look at it, these companies are eroding public trust in search of the almighty “engagement” dollar. And then they’re all shocked pikachu when people find ways to circumvent paying for content. So they double down on making things as difficult as possible for the end user, which makes the user double down on hating these companies and their malicious practices.
Ads and paywalls can work, but everybody (from publishers/content creators to advertisers and ad networks) need to sit down fix the glaring problems:
I’m sure we all could come up with more solutions. But we all know that all parties involved won’t do a damned thing to make things better for us.
And yet no matter how bad it gets, it still somehow is profitable. So pirating material doesn’t seem to be an effective means of protest because it seems there are enough people out there willing to pay for all of this garbage.
Ads. It's way easier for me to block ads than bypass paywalls.
I wouldn't mind paying but once more and more site adopt the subscribtion model, then prices like $10 a month becomes unsustainable when you need dozens of subscribtions. I believe that microtransactions are the future of the internet. All content should cost for you to view but only a little bit so that it adds up to like 20 - 50 bucks a month and the money goes mostly to the creators rather than platform.
that sounds horrible
Yeah would be nice if everything was free, wouldn't it?
That's how the internet worked before big corporations jumped in.
It worked great.
Academia would like a word.
Ads. I've been online since the age of Gopher. I've gone through every kind of ad or a pop-up you can throw at me. Even though I use an adblock, even without it I can subconsciously filter out ads so well that they won't bother me.
Hard agree. Ads, what ads? Those are just swaths of color in my peripheral vision. I watch old-timey television too, and those ads are my free time to do whatever else, like pee or get snacks.
Funny that changing your UA to like Googlebot means you can see the content since website owners want search indexing
Neither. Give me an easy option to donate. Even better, make it possible to donate based on how many times I visit the website, then give me an overview at the end of the month and let me split my budget.
Neither; use FOSS!
But in all seriousness, ads. They may be filled with trackers from big tech to try to know my every waking thought and sell them, but I have handy dandy software to deal with that.
I honestly think services like Apple News plus would be worth subscribing to if they didn’t charge so much and didn’t have ads. Having a “newspass” service where you could just pay $5 to bypass paywalls across multiple sites would be worth the money. The problem is that providers are addicted to that sweet ad revenue, so even paying a subscription fee on most sites means you’re still seeing annoying ads.
I prefer pay walls if I can buy a single article. I hate how everything is a subscription now.
Ads. But only when the ad doesn't stan.
The ones that invade privacy, I feel, are taking too much advantage.
Paywalls, but the content has to be absolutely stellar for me to consider paying for an account.
It depends.
Ads for something I use rarely or am not quite sure about.
But I pay for Netflix, and I suppose that's a paywall.
What's super annoying is when a website has both, and they autoplay. Like most news sites, and if you pause Netflix, something else will start playing, with sound even. I want to pay for what I use... but dayum.
The question is a bit loaded, since "prefer ads" means you see the content, whereas "prefer paywalls" means you don't.
A fairer framing would have been: "how do you prefer to pay for content?"
Because, contrary to many opinions here, there is a price to pay when you watch an ad. At the very least, you're paying with your sanity. And very possibly you're paying with your wallet too, later, when you buy some product or service you don't really need. If ads didn't work, there wouldn't be so many of them.
Next, in a world where content is funded by advertising, the people who control our tech have an infernal incentive to spy on us - so we all end up paying with our privacy.
Advertising is the lifeblood of consumer capitalism. It's what powers the pseudo-needs and pseudo-desires and status competition that drives all that material throughput of JUNK that is killing our planet. That price tag is gonna be pretty hefty.
Advertising is sheer poison. But paywalls are not the enemy. It is not immoral to pay for things that have value.
I prefer ads because I can block them. 👍
I keep telling people but if they keep using ad blockers, then they can expect less content to be available for free. Yet they all want to act like they're not responsible for this trend even though they are.
I keep telling advertisers but if they continue using intrusive ads that send information to Facebook or appear after content has loaded forcing us to misclick, then they can expect more people to use ad blockers. Yet they all want to act like they're not responsible for this trend even though they are.
It's not that simple, unfortunately. Even if you were concerned about the impact of using an adblocker, the ads are not like billboards, merely visual distractions, but rather ads now include invasive tracking and surveillance, and other malicious code that can freeze or make a website unusable. Ads often create an accessibility nightmare for some users. They also tend to use up data, making the internet less accessible to those in third world countries where internet access is slow and large data are a bigger problem.
There have been some half-hearted attempts to create standards for advertisements, but the reality is that greed has always undermined attempts for the private sector to self-regulate on this issue, so short of some kind of legislative action to curb these problems, you are going to get people trying to protect themselves with adblockers.
Less corporate content. But if big business wants to fuck right off the internet forever, it's okay by me.
Most types of ads can be blocked with uBlock Origin, while only some kinds of paywalls can be skipped with Bypass Paywalls Clean. Ads are the most privacy invasive monetization solution and with ad blocking becoming more common, I don't think ads are a sustainable way to fund content in the future. Still, I would prefer to see voluntary subscription and donation options rather than hard paywalls.
Make your content good enough and be a good enough person so that people are willing to give you money voluntarily or for token rewards. Let those with the means subsidize those without.
Occasionally you see something and the comments are full of "let me throw money at you". Maybe at least partially try that as a goal rather than searching for infinite growth at the expense of anyone who isn't an executive.
Obviously I don't like either and I love both ad blockers and tools that bypass paywalls.
But if forced to choose: I prefer ads. Here's why - there's no way I could reasonably afford to sign up for and pay for everything, if it was all behind a paywall. So I'd only have access to and be able to save a limited number of articles for myself.
But if it's just ad heavy, it's more accessible and I can still save it. The range of what I'd be able to save and retain is much larger this way.
Depends on the site. Ads don't bother me because ad block. I support paywalls in the case of sign up for some services, like InsaneJournal. Though, I otherwise have no preference either way since I usually don't go places with paywalls and when I do, I usually find a way to bypass them.
The question isn't really "ads or subs" these days, it's "your data or your dollar", and in this situation there is no good option (since your dollar is the perfect identifier for your data!).